


Nandroids in Space

by LaunchEscapeTower



Category: Emmy The Robot (Webcomic)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:13:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 112,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28175214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaunchEscapeTower/pseuds/LaunchEscapeTower
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Tilly's First Flight

>The Director dropped the nondescript manila folder on the conference table in front of his team. Nobody reached for it.  
>"The Russians will have a satellite up in six weeks." He studied the faces around him, a mix of grim acknowledgement and bewilderment, depending on which face he settled on.  
>upon learning that their rival was going all-in on the race to orbit last year, the organization had been hastily put together and funded before any serious goal had been set, simply to appear to be keeping pace.  
>They'd been nearly complete with construction of a capsule they fully believed would be able to ferry a man to the void and back, when the Air Force had curtly declined their request for test pilots, and the Pentagon had backed them.  
>Shortly after, official word had come down from Washington that manned missions were off the table until such technology could be proven, no politician wanted a dead test pilot splashed across the evening news after all.  
>"We're going to need to beat them." The Director said after several strained moments of silence from his team.  
>"Impossible, it'd take 2 months at least to design and fit a series of mechanical timers for the various stages of the flight if we worked in constant shifts, and the Reds are still ahead of us by half a year at least in that department." one frustrated team member finally offered up when nobody else spoke  
>"What about a chimp? Nobody's gonna care about an orbiting doohickey if we can put a life-form up there and bring it back first."  
>heads shook around the conference table  
>"No way, the life support systems on the Capricorn capsule still aren't done, and they'll have flown their little toy well before we've finished it"  
>"Why not radio control? We should be able to relay simple instructions, no?" another team member piped up hopefully  
>"Only until it passes the horizon, we don't have any relays that can keep a craft in contact once it's around the other side of the globe" yet another answered back sourly  
>A heavy silence blanketed the room for several more moments.  
>At the corner of the table, one man sat looking wistful at nothing for a moment before smiling slightly and pressing the beige intercom switch on the apparatus at the center of the table  
>"Tilly, will you fetch us some coffee?"  
>Through the static of the intercom, a mechanical-sounding voice answered back "Right away sir!"  
>The Director turned his back on the group and crossed his hands behind him  
>"Gentlemen, we're already skating on thin ice after the failure of the Zeus II test article last month, if those damned commies manage to beat us up there, I think there's a good chance we'll fold on this whole race and then we'll be out of a job."  
>Dejected, the man in charge looked down. "We need a miracle" he thought privately to himself  
>The conference room door swung open, and a muted mechanical hum accompanied the commercial robot who strolled in, tray full of steaming Styrofoam cups in hand  
>"Your coffees, sirs!" She chirped happily, bringing the first to the Director as was customary.  
>As the man who had summoned her took his cup from the tray, he looked up with a bold glance at his superior  
>"Sir, you say we don't have any kind of mechanical guidance system we can use on short-notice, right?"  
>The Director only stared at him. Nobody in his team ever rose frivolous arguments, they always had a point, and so he let the man continue without interruption  
>"We could work around the clock prepping something automatic to just orbit and beep, and we'd still probably fall short of the Ruskies, and we can't stuff a man into the Capricorn without life support even if we had permission to use humans, right?"  
>A couple of his coworkers gave him sudden sharp glances, the gears turning in their heads faster than in their superior's  
>"Where are you going with this?" The greying man asked inquisitively, hoping he wasn't simply indulging a flight of fancy in the younger man.  
>"Simple. We have a capsule built to hold a human form, we have a launch vehicle that's almost guranteed to put the payload on orbit, so long as the second stage lights okay, all we really need is something to guide the craft and perform the required steps at the right times"  
>The director shook his head "Only thing that could do that is a man, and without life support yet that's a nonstarter"  
>The younger team-member grinned, as if about to declare checkmate in a contested game  
>"So don't send a man, too expensive, too much risk." Turning his head, he stared with an inscrutable gaze at Tilly, who'd handed out the last of the coffee and was preparing to leave  
>"Tilly dear? How would you like to do something amazing?"

>Nandroid serial number 44571 was manufactured at Sterling Robotics' Detroit plant, part of a class of fifty she attended standard nandroid training alongside before they all were split up to be assigned their individual assignments  
>Tilly's assignment had been different than most however, as the fledgling national space agency had come into being in the last few years Sterling had sent slick-tongued lobbyists to Washington and had successfully attached a rider to this year's funding bill for the program.  
>Thanks to a few exchanged favors and some quiet negotiation, a bit of intentionally-vague language had been included in the bill, granting a relief from taxes for any corporation quote "selflessly assisting the nation's space program" end quote.  
>Owing to the purposeful-vagueness of the bill's language, Sterling Robotics had managed to skirt an outright absurd percentage of their obligate tax by simply donating a spare nandroid to the space agency, to use as they deemed fit  
>And so, Tilly had went directly from nandroid training to being secretary/assistant to an entire agency full of men every bit as needy as the children she'd been designed to care for. She'd handled the transition smoothly enough, nandroids were adaptable or so Sterling advertised, and despite the lack of actual children to care for she'd fallen in quite easily to assisting the men of the agency get by with nerves intact.  
>She found the unorthodox job welcoming, if you'd asked her, so many humans grateful for things as simple as a quickly-delivered report, or a round of coffee. It made her feel needed, useful, and even fulfilled in accordance with her deliberately servile programming.  
>"She's gonna need a lot of training to operate the Capricorn" one engineer had said one day within her earshot  
>"They cram their standard training in two weeks, or so I hear. I think she'll do okay" another had answered him, ending the mild dispute.  
>The training was indeed rigorous, for the next week it was as if she was in nandroid training all over again, only accelerated and with more g-forces. She only was given time enough to recharge herself before the wide array of tests and exams would start again, regularly straining her capacity for uptime between recharges.  
>One day in her intense conditioning, a stray thought emerged unbeckoned out of her CPU or elsewhere and she began to grin earhole to earhole as her instructor reviewed emergency scenarios over again with her  
>"Tilly? What's the matter?" He'd asked, genuinely perplexed. Generally machines never did anything unexpected.  
>Her grin widening, she tensed slightly "I was just thinking sir, this is RIVETING!"  
>The instructor stared at her blankly, causing her to snicker loudly  
>"RIVETING!" she repeated, her voice rising in pitch as a sense of hilarity flooded her awareness  
>"Like rivets? 'cause I'm a robot? Get it?" She searched the human's face for any trace of reaction  
>Sterling Robotics did not keep any official records on their product's sense of humor, but if they had, an exhaustive cross-reference would have confirmed that Tilly had the single worst sense of humor of all products they'd made to date.  
>A week later, Tilly was tested on a centrifuge, pushing her tiny aluminum frame near its breaking point and far beyond a human's lethal limit. Part of her hated the discomfort with all the constant blaring internal warnings from sensors never designed for such situations, but she was also disquieted to realize a small part of her subconscious was able to ignore the warnings, and wanted to go faster.  
>After the spin-test, Tilly had been directed to yet another technician, and had had her already short hair cut even shorter, leaving it in a sort of shaggy pixie-cut  
>"It's for recording your neuron-analogs" the scientist-barber had explained while shaping her previously changeless hair  
>"The more of this synth-hair in the way, the harder it'll be to read your head!" he'd added with a laugh, giving Tilly a suddenly odd sense of discomfort she was not used to.  
>It had been more than a week since her synthetic hair had been altered, and still the relatively young nandroid was fussing with the chopped result fruitlessly, trying to become comfortable looking anything unlike her original factory-set specs  
>"Are you ready?" A human's voice behind her, unnoticed entering her tiny room with her attention focused.  
>Reconciling at once with the state of her hair, she turned from her mirror and gave the agency associate a wide smile  
>"As ready as I'm capable of being!"  
>Several minutes later, she'd been directed to a 'changing room', a wide closet really, furnished only with a simple stool and her fitted flight-suit draped over it.  
>Suddenly a strange and unfamiliar shiver ran down her spinal struts, registering as random anomalies in her internal records as she hurriedly finished suiting up  
>"Pre-flight jitters" she'd muttered out loud to herself after the last of the pad techs had departed from the capsule, leaving her strapped in place aboard a shaped bit of aluminum to be hefted by a missile into the unknown.  
>Processing the numerous possibilities, Tilly inhaled cool air passing it over her CPU and exhaling the waste-heat with every breath, roughly once per second as she struggled to gather enough relevant data on her situation.  
>the rocket was fueled, the capsule door was sealed, the countdown had progressed nominally for the last hour, and Tilly had a non-refundable ticket.  
>despite the training, conditioning and hours of careful lectures on her upcoming flight, somehow this moment felt more real than what had preceded it. Had she overclocked without knowing it? The world was full of detail and she was noting too much of it.  
>with quiet deliberation, she slowed her excited processor back to base-level, and the strangely shiny quality of the world around her settled back into normality. "Two minutes" a voice crackled over the intercom.

>"Ignition check good, T minus sixty" Tilly fidgeted in her seat as the faraway voice from the intercom ticked down the last minute.  
>Her orders were clear and had been drilled into her so repeatedly that the mission checklist seemed to her as familiar as her own internal diagnostic checklist  
>Launch, stage separation, coast, secondary burn, orbit once, reorient at 75 minutes from launch and initiate third burn retrograde, reorient heat shield down, pop parachutes after four minutes of radio blackout through reentry, and finally await recovery teams on the ground.  
>the sequence of events ran through her head on a rapid loop so all-consuming that she nearly missed the last several seconds ticked off by the voice on the intercom  
>"Five, four, main engine sequence start, three, two, one!" The massive contraption shuddered underneath her, and Tilly's vision imedietly blurred as a powerful vibration rocked her in her seat  
>forcing her optics to reopen from being squeezed shut involuntarily, she caught one look out of the tiny porthole window of red steel falling away behind her  
>"Tower clear, anomaly on second stage....no cancel that, just a shimmy" the voice crackled in, and Tilly forced her eyes from the view port to begin reading values off the control panel, internal inertia warnings blaring at her that she was accelerating far too fast for a little nandroid.  
>One minute in, the vehicle gave another sharp shudder, and Tilly saw a rush of white momentarily appear across the viewport. "Max-Q" she said automatically, having done this part of the simulation dozens of times already.  
>This wasn't like the simulations though, gazing out the port window she could see the slight curvature of the landscape falling away behind her, and the sky above it growing blacker by the minute  
>"Ready for stage-sep.....now!" the voice on the intercom registered to her as more anxious than it had been a few moments before, but Tilly only acknowledged and gripped the armrests of her seat  
>A powerful 'BANG' rang throughout the vessel, followed by a few lesser 'ting' sounds, as if a handful of light gravel had been thrown at her ship  
>"MECO confirmed, coast trajectory looking good, calculating apogee now" Tilly looked from the instrument readouts down at the intercom, its wire leading up to her earpiece and dangling across her lap awkwardly.  
>only the wire wasn't simply resting anymore, it was moving, floating upwards to dangle in front of her face, hanging in mid-air. Internal gyroscopes intended to help the nandroid's sense of balance, began shouting internal warnings that she was in free-fall.  
>it took several moments to overcome the artificial panic, the manufacturer-designed instinct to 'tuck and roll' and avoid fall damage, but she was able to compartmentalize the sensation and prioritize her mission  
>"Tilly? we read your apogee as 170 miles up, confirm on your instruments?" glancing at the altimeter, Tilly read the figures back to him and heard a muffled applause from the room back home  
>The Capricorn continued to rise, slowing as it reached the peak of its arc. At mission control's word, she'd reached forward and pressed a red switch activating a pre-timed burn, and once again was rocked back into her seat by the acceleration, headphone cord clinging to her faceplate.  
>when the dull roar and worryingly shaky burn had ended, the headphone's cable floated once more, and this time Tilly found her hands floating off the armrests as well  
>"We're showing a good orbit down here, eccentric but definitely an orbit. Congratulations Tilly, you're the first object to orbit Earth!"  
>A strange sense flooded her, a feeling of suddenly being watched by a million eyes, a disquieting feeling she mentally discarded as mere paranoia  
>"Next activity in 60 minutes, you've got a little downtime but we'd still like you to run through some instrument checks."  
>"And the camera?" she answered back enthusiastically. The capsule had been fitted last-minute with a crude camera on the exterior, exposed film winding back inside and into a closed container in the cabin to be retrieved by the pilot  
>"Of course, you've got thirty exposures up there so take whatever images you want" The board had been against the idea, no camera existed that could provide usable intel on ground targets in their rival's nation, and so any images taken of the Earth were going to be simply good PR and not anything serious.  
>Tilly ran the few preliminary checks that were requested of her, but when the requests came in less frequently she found herself staring out through the tiny port window.  
>Space. She'd had an idea of it before ever strapping into the capsule, but she found all previous definitions of the concept falling short of what she was witnessing now and discarded the useless data, taking in the view without preconception  
>Deep rich blues of oceans and lakes, browns and greys of rippling mountains, patches of yellow telling her of deserts, brilliant green everywhere telling her of life  
>she stared, memorized by the sights, and so caught up in the unfamiliar rapture of the moment that she missed the next comms check from mission control. "Tilly? Copy?"  
>one of those strange, stray thoughts without identifiable origin bubbled its way to the surface of her mind as she gazed out the porthole  
>"No sirs up here" she said softly to nobody.

>"Ten more seconds" Tilly breathed to herself as the deorbit burn commenced, shoving her back into her seat yet again as applied thrust slowed the capsule's speed and dropped its trajectory back into the atmosphere  
>after ten more seconds, the engine shut off with a final 'shoof!' that gave the cabin a tremor. Looking out the porthole, Tilly frowned as the scene continued rotating slowly, rather than remaining stationary  
>"Don't worry, your center of mass will orient the Capricorn naturally as you re-enter" mission control hurridly said into her earpiece, as if having the same reservation she felt  
>She answered back with a terse "Copy" but wasn't reassured. Re-entering the atmosphere was the most dangerous phase in the flight, and she was to be the first test of how it worked, a thought which she was acutely aware of  
>for the next several minutes, Tilly busied herself triple-checking the instrument panel and taking a few final photographs of the landscape beneath her, the last bit of film winding into a canister just below her legs and sealing  
>fixing her optics on the porthole window, Tilly watched with mechanically sharp focus as the brilliant blue/green marble grew closer and closer, choking off the star-pocked blackness she'd been witness to over the past hour  
>the tremor was nearly imperceptible at first, and her own internal readouts measured it before the Capricorn's instrument panel did  
>it quickly grew from a tremor to a stronger shaking, then finally a violent one as the permanent night of space slipped from view to be replaced with the blues of the atmosphere, then finally flashes of white  
>"It's on fire!" She exclaimed, then remembered she was in communications blackout, the plasma sheath of heated atmosphere around her capsule blocking her off from the rest of the world  
>with wide optics, she stared at the flashes of yellow-white rushing over the porthole, her mind involuntarily overclocking again to capture every bit of sensory data. It made the world seem somehow sharper, shinier, and she wondered briefly if humans ever felt such a sensation.  
>the cabin flooded with a red light and an obnoxious buzz. Tilly tore her eyes from the wonder out the window and narrowed on a dull red bulb lit up against the rest of the control panel  
>She had never experienced dread before, and wasn't well-eqipped for the conclusion her mind reached after staring at the warning light a moment.  
>The heat-shield was already mostly gone, ablated away and now transferring the extreme heat of re-entry directly into the capsule's frame and cabin.  
>Looking around the cabin in a momentary panic, Tilly had to deliberately calm herself, after all there was nothing that could be done about it now.  
>taking in a deep breath of air, an internal monitor flashed a heat warning at her, the ambient temperature of the cabin was rising sharply and she was beginning to feel it  
>"Please, just hold together a little longer!" Tilly surprised herself by exclaiming out loud to the thoughtless machine.  
>The loud shaking of the capsule continued a minute longer, then began to ease as the white-hot plasma visible through the porthole vanished and the control panel read out a relatively slower speed.  
>She'd made it through re-entry. Laughing spontaneously, she flicked the intercom switch and spoke to re-acquire communication with mission control  
>"Whew, talk about being in the HOT SEAT! Eh? EH?" She laughed again, but there was no reply in her earpiece. "He doesn't get it" she thought to herself and rolled her optics  
>Dutifully she watched the altimeter tick down as the atmosphere thickened around the falling capsule, and at the appointed time she reached out and flicked a covered switch  
>A pyrotechnic charge blew a cover off the trio of tightly-packed parachutes, but as it did embers scattered across the rapidly-expanding fabric chutes, several getting caught and continuing to burn  
>it took only moments for Tilly to register that something was wrong, the rate of speed wasn't slowing as expected, and the capsule had picked up a foreign spin that she'd been unable to account for  
>"Mission control? Sirs? I think there's something wrong with the parachutes, I'm falling too fast!" Tilly waited for a reply, but received none. Had the antenna been burned off during reentry?  
>Steeling her synthetic nerves as the capsule spun and fell out of control, she first unfastened the belts across her lap and chest, then reached down to pull the film canister free and pocketed it  
>affixed to her back was a last-resort fail-safe, one mission control hadn't seriously thought would be used, but had included anyway as the weight cost had been negligible considering Tilly's small size relative to a human pilot  
>holding herself steady on the armrests of the seat with one hand, she reached towards the bar securing the capsule's entrance, took a deep breath, and pulled.

>the roar of the air was deafening, louder than anything she had experienced so far in her short life.  
>as she pulled herself towards the now open door, the capsule lurched under the new aerodynamics, and Tilly was thrown from Capricorn like a rag doll tumbling end over end  
>once more the 'free-fall warning' registered in her internal diagnostics, but after over an hour of it in orbit she was now fully-capable of compartmentalizing it and avoiding panic  
>stretching out her limbs, Tilly ceased to tumble, and oriented herself face down as the ground rushed up at her  
>she let herself take the moment in, the sights and sounds all recording in hyper-fidelity to her permanent memory as her overclocked mind took in everything it could  
>grabbing at her chest for a few moments, she hooked the handle there and gave it a hard yank. The handle came away in her hand.  
>"Okay! Too hard then!" She nervously said out loud to herself, but couldn't hear her own voice over the rush of the oncoming air  
>scrambling for the spare, Tilly was careful to only gently pull this handle. This time the parachute deployed, but as it did Tilly tumbled once more, and some of the lines snagged around her arm and prevented full deployment  
>spinning and feeling as if her arm was about to fail at the joints, she glanced from the all-too-close ground back up at the feeble parachute searching for any way out.  
>Forty MPH? Fifty? She couldn't be sure, her internal sensors feeding her a jumble of contradictory information.  
>staring with a sense of helplessness down at the ground mere seconds away, Tilly felt a strange sense of calm that comforted her in what she was sure would be her last moments  
>"At least it wasn't Stress-Testing" she said to herself with a shrug, and impacted the desert floor with the energy of an automobile crash.

EPILOGUE

>"Remarkable, I had no idea they were made so durable" a voice registered in the darkness of semi-consciousness  
>"Made to withstand an entire childhood's worth of punishment, or so the commercials say" came another  
>Rebooting cold, Tilly first had a BIOS diagnostic available to her before any other sensation returned  
>New hardware was registering all over, hands, an arm, nearly every internal sensor, all new components turning on for the first time  
>Slowly, with unsure caution, she checked over the new hardware internally as the reboot sequence finished and control of her body returned  
>"There, she should be back online now. Tilly? Can you hear me?" the first voice called out to her, clearer than before.  
>Tilly let her optics open and digested the visual information they provided. She was in some sort of lab, reminding her of her first hard memory of waking up in Sterling's Detroit plant  
>"Am I..." she began to speak, then stopped herself. For just a moment, a silly thought had struck her, that perhaps she had reincarnated. One of the nandroids of her graduating class had been sure it was not simply possible, but likely given the finite number of personality configurations in their kind, and the baseless theory had infected the class like a mental pox.  
>"Back from the scrapheap? You sure are, had to replace over 45% of you but after that flight Sterling was keen on getting you back to working order, I guess the clout of having manufactured the first object in space outweighed whatever your new components cost them"  
>Tilly blinked several times, still pouring over the new data her senses were taking in, but the agency rep ignored her surprise and kept talking  
>"Everyone's seen the headlines already, 'Space-Nanny Sets World Record', and by god you can bet the Reds are absolutely steaming over it. The agency wants you on the talk-show circuit, gotta take advantage of the moment after all"  
>Tilly sat up on the table slowly, placing her hands to either side of her and sliding her legs off the side. "The moment, sir?"  
>"Yes, the President is fast-tracking new budgetary concessions and even trying to get the Air Force to finally cooperate to give us a real person to fly! Not to mention you'll be flaunting our success in the commie's faces every time you appear."  
>Tilly looked down, uncharacteristically silent for a moment. "You're going to be flying humans, then?" she asked, her tone low as she refused to meet his eyes  
>The man stopped, finally seeming to notice Tilly herself rather than merely talking at her.  
>"What's wrong? I thought you'd be happy, after all you survived and the agency is going to retire you with honors, not outmoding but a regular retirement from duties, you're a national hero now"  
>Tilly remained silent, optics furtively glancing from one floor tile to the next  
>Finally after a long awkward moment, she turned to look up at him with a mixed expression, something between fear and determination  
>"With all due respect sir..."  
>she took in a deep breath, and steadied herself.  
>"...I want to fly again."


	2. Tilly's Second Flight

>Recovery of the shattered robot had occurred four hours after impact, tracking down her exact position on the badlands proving difficult even from the air.  
>A small crater filled with aluminum shrapnel and a nearly unrecognizable torso attached to a shredded parachute fluttering in the wind was spotted before the larger impact crater of the ill-designed Capricorn capsule.  
>After confirmation that her hard-drive was still intact, Tilly's broken body had been neatly packaged and shipped by air to a Sterling refurbishment facility in Ohio, spending nearly a month there being carefully put back together with an array of replacement components and a few entirely new ones.  
>Sterling had refused any cooperation with the space agency in regards to sharing proprietary data on their products, and had insisted on doing the repair work themselves before shipping the deactivated unit back to them.  
>After several days of recovery and debriefing, Tilly had been sent again by plane, this time in a seat instead of by crate, to New York, and had sat on a float during a flashy parade she felt to be overly-ostentatious, but even so still enjoyed waving to all the happy humans and fellow nandroids who'd turned out.  
>Her first talk show appearance had been unsatisfying, a short barrage of basic questions that anyone should've known the answers to in her opinion, followed by a cut to commercial and a quick hurrying-off of the stage.  
>At the second such appearance she began to grow disillusioned, and fell into answering the same simple questions in the same inane pattern. Feeling her initial glee at being on TV die back, Tilly began to think of herself as merely a useful gimmick, there only to promote the agency and increase public support. On other channels, now even the politicians were using her flight to argue this point and that.  
>The third televised appearance she'd just floated through, giving the answers she knew the audience wanted but feeling no joy in relating her experience to them now. She was bored.

>That evening, she'd flown back to Tampa, recharging along the way, and arrived at the agency's rapidly-expanding mission control, their budget increased tenfold in the wake of Tilly's return.  
>A short, slightly slurred and self-congratulatory speech from the Director had caused a toast to be raised in the main control room, two dozen faces at shiny new computer consoles holding champagne aloft and drinking in unison.  
>It was a far cry from the dingy control room the crew had manned during her inaugural flight, that sad cramped room now reallocated as storage and forgotten in the march of progress.  
>Tilly had awkwardly kept herself to the side of the new room as the humans had congratulated themselves and inebriated together, her mind wandering with with less-than-happy thoughts, but she was shaken from them by a large hand tousling her short hair.  
>"This is all your fault, you know" The agency Director said with a beaming grin and gesturing at the new control room before finishing what was certainly not his first glass of the evening.  
>Recharging in her new on-campus suite (roughly a quarter the size of a one-bedroom apartment, but she liked the word), Tilly stared up at the ceiling and waited before entering her semi-conscious powersave state, apparently not yet through with her day's thoughts  
>How many more of these vapid appearances would she be asked to do before she could fly again? The agent she'd spoken to when first revived hadn't given any clear answer, and the uncertainty was eating at her continuously.  
>"Hmph, they're so busy shaking hands that they aren't even trying to look ahead" she spoke out loud to herself, a habit that had been forming ever since her solo-flight had left her temporarily with nobody to talk to but herself.  
>She tried to rationalize her desires in terms of her being the necessary first, that she was simply paving a new path forward for humanity and all that talk, but the thoughts felt hollow and false as she examined them.  
>Sighing on her cot, she looked out through the small dorm's window at the rising moon, a silver crescent in the night sky.  
>"No, that's not right" She said to herself quietly, then lapsed back into silence. In truth, she was technically interested in human's technology breaking new ground for them it was true, but she couldn't delude herself into thinking that was the primary motivation behind her wish to fly again.  
>Staring out the window at the moon for many minutes as it rose, she finally reconciled the selfish desire to fly again with the presumed eventual goals of the agency itself, and thought about it hard into the night before surrendering to her powersave state

>Three nights later, she again was flown to New York, her talk show circuit hitting a crescendo.  
>The interview with this host had been pleasant, no interesting questions she hadn't already answered a million times, but there had been a jovial attitude from the host that had endeared the man to her.  
>After several minutes of cordial but basic questions, the host asked precisely the one she'd been waiting and prepared for.  
>"So then Tilly, what do you see yourself doing in the future?" He asked bemusedly, as he'd acted throughout the interview with the automaton.  
>"Well Johnny," She'd been explicitly instructed not to refer to him as "Mr Carson" or "sir", "What I really want to do, and I think I can do it, is land on the moon!"  
>The sharpness of the audience response shocked her, and she'd looked bewildered when they gave her a deafening standing ovation punctuated by patriotic whoops and cheers.  
>Even the host had been caught off guard by the overwhelming display of support, and had fumbled for a hasty segue into the next commercial break.   
>All through the flight home to mission control, Tilly thought about what she'd said, and more so how the crowd of humans had reacted. She smiled to herself through the trip, remembering the cheers and playing the happy feeling back to herself on loop.  
>"I think that got 'em" She said quietly to herself as she gazed out at the passing landscape below.

>"Are you out of your goddamned mind!?" Georges, the engineer who'd originally suggested her promotion to mechanical guidance for Capricorn, shouted at her the moment she'd walked in through the double doors to mission control.  
>"L-language si-" she began, but was cut off by another shout  
>"SHUT UP! Do you have ANY idea the kind of pressure you just put us all under?! You shot across the Soviet's fucking bow and we don't even have the hardware ready to back up your boast!"  
>Tilly wisely remained silent, but stewed. That wasn't true she thought, multiple proof-of-concept prototypes had been worked on for a variety of vehicles, including at least one lunar lander.  
>"The President is demanding the agency push for a landing anyway, because if we back down from it now it's not just the agency losing face, it's the country!" Georges scowled at her and took several paces forward, intimidating the small nandroid simply by looming over her.  
>"He's asking us to commit to a two month deadline. Two fucking months Tilly, our PROTOTYPE hardware hasn't even been tested yet, let alone YOU!" He added the last word sharply, making Tilly wince.  
>"You need to understand that you can't just go out there and...DECLARE what we're going to do next to a crowd of millions!" He continued, berating the nandroid well beyond the already-delivered point, "Since when does a fucking machine drive policy around here, huh?!"  
>Suddenly fierce, a self-righteous indignation rose out of Tilly from somewhere unknown, and she looked up at the engineer angrily, balling her small fists.  
>"Don't you bully me around, I'm not one of your new interns you know, I'm not even ON payroll!" She shouted back at him defiantly, surprising even herself  
>"NO, YOU'RE PROPERTY!" He yelled back in her face. Tilly recoiled as if slapped, and at the expression on her faceplate he pulled back, turning away.  
>"Recharge, we can discuss mission planning in the morning." He mumbled curtly before exiting the building through the doors she'd just used.  
>Tilly sat down on her cot when she reached her suite, and looked silently at the door, rattled from the hot-tempered exchange. She'd never yelled at anyone in anger before, or been yelled at so harshly.  
>She knew she was guilty, she'd proposed shooting for the moon on purpose, bypassed the agency and gone straight at the public's fickle attention, and she'd been prepared for the potential blowback if it meant she could fly again, or so she'd thought.  
>"So why does it feel like this?" She muttered to herself sadly, her mind replaying the angry shouts of Georges as she curled up on the cot and plugged her power supply in for the night.

>The following week was another flurry of activity not unlike the one which had preceded her first flight. A tour of the prototyping floor where her ride was being hastily assembled came first, and she'd had a multitude of questions regarding the designs. Another ludicrous-speed run on the centrifuge came next, followed by a round of low-G exercises lasting days.  
>"It's crazy, she never passes out and we keep cranking the speed on her 'til the damn thing starts shaking." The sadistic engineer who'd run her previous test now aided another in tying her into the low-G harness. "You can't beat me, sir." She'd answered back warily with a weak thumbs-up. She was incapable of being knocked out by the centrifuge, but the machine had still pushed her frame hard enough for her to ache. "Imagine your bones ringing like bells sir" She'd described it after her first run.  
>It was crucial to test whether she'd be mobile in the lower lunar gravity, and the engineers had designed an ad hoc rig set with rubber hoses that tugged up at her waist and gave her an unnatural bounce when moving.  
>While difficult to acclimate to at first, Tilly soon found it to be the most fun part of her training so far, and her new toggle-accelerometers let her experience the simulated low-G without the usual background warnings on her internal readouts, turning them off and on at will.

>The second week of training proved to be the most dangerous, one afternoon Tilly had been led outside and driven by golf-cart to a flat concrete pad set away from the rest of mission control. A small contraption the size of a car sat on the pad, and Tilly cocked her head at it. Four bare aluminum girders for legs, a squat engine bell on the underside, and what looked like a lawn-chair stuck between bulbous steel fuel tanks.  
>"I'm supposed to fly THAT?!" Tilly exclaimed incredulously, balking at the ramshackle machine. A series of long cables anchored it to four tall steel towers, reminding her of the harness she'd spend the last week using.  
>"It's supposed to try and emulate lunar gravity, I don't know how accurate it is but if you can get it to hop once then you're cleared for launch, or closer to it at least" the pad tech explained with a nonchalant shrug. "There's 34 seconds of fuel so make 'em count"  
>"Well I'm pretty inspired" Tilly said dryly, then smirked. "Guess I better HOP to it?"  
>The pad tech stared at her blankly, and she shook her head. "Nevermind" she muttered as she moved towards the lander test article with a sigh. "They never get it"  
>Up close the device seemed even more crude than on first inspection. Small nozzles and a tangle of plumbing feeding them would presumably act as her reaction-control-system keeping her orientation correct, but she only had a limited idea of how sensitive the throttle would be and had a momentary nightmare about shooting off the pad and arcing into the dirt with a bang.  
>Giving one final check of her safety belts, Tilly flicked two ignition switches, then pulled down a long lever slowly, opening up the engine and feeling the machine hum to life under her.  
>Jerky at first, then easing up, the vehicle lifted a few feet as she gave tiny mechanically precise micro-adjustments to the throttle, then a few more as she grew accustomed to the controls, until it hovered around thirty above the pad.  
>"And back down again" Tilly said, though the roar of the engine drowned her out. Tilting the crude joystick, the craft tipped slightly, then moved a few feet laterally before slowing and beginning to drop  
>"Landing sequence..." she spoke to nobody, only mouthing the words to herself as she felt that familiar glow of her CPU overclocking, lighting up all the detail around her.  
>Nearing the ground, the test-lander was shifted slightly by a stray air current, picking up tilt and more horizontal speed.   
>"Nonono!" She jerked back on the joystick to counter the tilt, then cried out as two legs hit the concrete and skidded bumpily for several feet  
>She cut off the throttle quickly, and braced as the machine skidded to a two-legged stop, seemingly ready to topple over from the sideways momentum  
>With a groan, Tilly shifted her upper body the opposite direction of the near-tip, and miraculously the lander settled back on all fours.  
>Fire crews were already rushing towards her as she unclipped her harness and stood atop the lander, smoke from the smoldering engine billowing behind her.   
>Waving at the emergency staff, she suddenly laughed as the thrill of her flight finally caught up her senses. For just a moment, the worry and doubt surrounding her upcoming flight had been replaced with the same thrill she'd felt during her first. She grinned and called out to fire teams.  
>"Any landing you walk away from is a good one, right?" and laughed again.

>Despite the newfound fame from her world-famous flight, the promise of honorable retirement from duties, and the long hours imposed by training, Tilly still found herself occasionally fetching coffee and delivering reports with her as she shuttled back and forth throughout the complex, just as she had in her pre-flight life.  
>Sure, there was an entire busload of new interns for all that now, but every time Tilly spotted one of them struggling to keep up in their duties she stepped in to pick up the slack, she couldn't help herself.  
>Two weeks after her now-infamous Carson appearance, she was delivering a tray of coffee to some men in the central control room, finding them all clustered around one monitor muttering in hushed and worried tones.  
>Curious, she set down the drinks and made her way to the edge of the group. Between them she got a glimpse of a black and white photo taped to the monitor. It was the moon's surface, as viewed through their best ground telescopes.  
>Georges, glancing away from the photo, finally noticed Tilly and gave her a passive look. Raising a finger he pointed to a fuzzy gray patch over a black crater, longer on one side.  
>"The Russians just shot the moon."  
>The papers that evening were filled with doom-and-gloom predictions of Soviet advancements as well as that blurry telescope image showing the dust from impact, but in mission control the story was more muted and dismissive of their rival's achievement.  
>"No mid-course-correction, no guidance at all by the looks of it, it's obvious they just fitted a dummy weight to an ICBM and threw it at the moon, it's well-within their known capabilities!"  
>The engineer who spoke grabbed at a coffee mug and sent it flying in frustration causing Tilly to cry out as it shattered. "It's not progress, it's just fucking littering!"  
>One tech looked away from the outburst back at Tilly, acknowledging her worried look with a nod.  
>"Doesn't matter what it was , they hit the moon first, now the only way to one-up those bastards is to stick the soft-landing, no room for error or second chances. A failure for either us or them changes the game entirely." It was hard for Tilly to feel optimistic when the people around her acted this way, their motivations so far removed from her own.  
>"We'll get it done." She said to the small group with uncharacteristic confidence, turning all heads in the room. She wanted to bolster their confidence, get them working efficiently on putting her in the pilot's seat again. She wanted to bolster her own confidence too, and not let them see the nervousness in her optics.   
>At the beginning of the third week, the Director had gathered everyone he could, Tilly included, for a terse meeting.  
>"The President has moved up the timetable, apparently he thinks we're all just sitting on our asses while the Russians are finishing a lander of their own, a MANNED one." There were grumbles around the room about just how true that claim really was. Rumor had it that they'd lost a human pilot on a failed reentry not long after Tilly's recovery, a supposed attempt to one-up the robot, but the state media had denied it was anything other than a sounding rocket test.  
>"How long?" Georges spoke up, crossing his arms and mentally calculating how much work was left to be done on the total vehicle.  
>"Two weeks." The team stared, silent. He continued. "So, from here on out we work in shifts, no breaks, nobody goes home and we can all catch up on our sleep when we have a robot on the Moon."  
>Groans of protests then had shot up among the team, but every objection resulted in a work assignment to solve the problem, and so people stopped trying to squeeze more time out of the arbitrary schedule.

>Various non-standard upgrades had been included in Tilly's repair at Sterling, besides now-redundant sensors being removed and her hard-drive capacity being tripled by the addition of two new slave-drives, she also had a longer-lasting and more efficient battery than what was currently commercially available from the robotics corporation (that season, but the holidays were coming up).  
>With the new power-source, Tilly was able to extend her uptime well beyond her original model's limit, and she needed every minute of it now as she spent nearly every moment of uptime running between buildings at the request of this engineer or that.  
>"No no, you don't need all that, just get rid of it!" Georges was exclaiming at a group of engineers swarming over the prototype lander when she'd entered the busy hanger.  
>"No radiation shielding? Won't that, y'know, kill her?" came back an incredulous answer from a man nervously glancing at the approaching nandroid.  
>"Actually, my important components already have adequate shielding, if anything you'll need to shield the lander computer the same way." She said loudly to be heard over the echo of sounds in the hanger, coming to a stop next to Georges.  
>She gave a wary look up at the tall engineer beside her. He shrugged. "You heard her, ditch the external stuff and wrap up the computer, every ounce counts."  
>The phrase had become begrudgingly popular in the hanger over the last several days, as the too-heavy lander was trimmed and chopped to become light enough for return flight.  
>"Speaking of, Tilly, do you think you could get a parachute deployment right if you had to do it again?" the question was somewhat demeaning she thought, but his voice carried no hint of malice.  
>"I nearly did the first time sir, and I'd never even been trained for it. I think I've got it now, if I have to jump again. Why?"  
>He didn't answer right away, instead turning back to the engineers and whistling loudly. Tilly hated the sharp sound. "Get that heat-shield off of there too! Lose it entirely, that frees up quite a bit!"  
>Tilly raised an eyebrow at him. "We are still planning on bringing me back, or did I miss a meeting?"  
>"Over there, that white crate, see?" Georges pointed a crooked finger at the racks of stored crates set against one wall. Tilly cocked her head.  
>"An early prototype, proof-of-concept really. It'll work though, your own personal heat-shield and parachute system. We called it 'MOOSE', shorthand for 'man out of space easiest' "  
>"And now it's a NOOSE?" she asked with a light chuckle then checked herself after a moment, trying not to think about the morbid imagery.

>The flight was going to be a 'Lunar Direct' as the Director was calling it. Launch straight into a course for the moon skipping orbit, two long burns to slow down and land skipping orbital insertion there too. She'd get out, take a few steps, plant a flag and grab a few rocks. A camera was planned, so that she could photograph the Soviet's bullseye when she arrived. The director had hope that a picture of Russian debris photographed by an American nandroid would play well in the evening news.  
>After, the entire lander/service module chimera would lift off and launch straight into an Earth-return course to intercept the top of the atmosphere. Near reentry, Tilly would get outside the ship and unpack the now sarcastically-renamed 'NOOSE', getting inside the device and kicking away from the now-useless ship.  
>looking over the chalkboard itinerary with Georges, she felt a pang of worry. She wasn't afraid to fly, not by a long shot, but the agency was pushing this flight way too fast now in her opinion, and cutting too many corners for her to remain totally comfortable.  
>At the corner of her attention, she caught a glimpse at the wall-mounted black and white television in the corner of the room, airing a press conference with the President. To Tilly, he seemed befuddled to find himself explaining to the nation why they were sending a maid to the moon. "Is it dirty up there?" one reporter called out, getting a laugh from the press pool and Tilly herself.  
>"This kind of direct launch normally wouldn't work you see, the lander would be too heavy" Georges was saying when she'd laughed, then apologized with a grin at him.  
>"But I don't require oxygen, food or water, excessive shielding from radiation, even a recoverable ship apparently." She finished his point for him, turning back to the chalkboard.  
>"I think we've got this, sir, I really do." She didn't, and her reservations had compounded with every bit of training, but she wasn't going to show it now.  
>"Let's hope so Tilly."

>The day before launch, Tilly found herself not nervous as she'd expected, but instead restless. She wanted to go somewhere, to occupy herself with something, anything to simply take her mind off of tomorrow.  
>Without consulting anyone, she left mission control and started walking down the road absentmindedly. Overhead the sky passed from purple to black, and stars emerged as she silently strolled along with no destination in mind.  
>Lost in thought, she snapped back to awareness when she'd reached the first lamp posts marking the outskirts of the city nearest to the launch complex. Had she really walked this far already?   
>Not stopping, she transitioned from the shoulder of the road to sidewalk a few minutes later, passing closed businesses and a succession of open bars as she moved downtown.   
>The handful of people out walking that evening paid her no mind, before leaving mission control she'd changed from her blue jumpsuit back into her old official Sterling uniform. It made her invisible, with so many identical dresses seen on nearly identical robots each day, people looked straight past her as they did with all the other nandroids.  
>She was pulled from her thoughts again and stopped at a set of stairs leading down to a basement-level door, turning her head as she heard applause coming from the other side.   
>A rush of sights and sounds met her when she pulled the door open and stepped through. People sitting at tables, cigar and cigarette smoke hanging in the air, dim lighting except for one bright bulb hooded and aimed down at a short wooden stage set half a foot off the ground, backed by a curtain.  
>"A cabaret?" She wondered out loud, her voice lost in the room. Sticking to the shadowed back wall, she kept out of sight and sat at an unoccupied table. She had a sense of unease that had been steadily building for weeks now, and sitting in this unfamiliar setting her recent experiences felt suddenly alien. She stared hard at the table.  
>What was she doing? Not just here, but in general? She thought about the skeletal lander stripped down to nearly nothing, the unsettling and untested NOOSE reentry, about potentially spinning off into space forever or even being stranded on the moon. The last seconds of her first flight replayed in her mind, the static at the millisecond of impact making her shudder in her seat.  
>Music began to play, and a woman's voice sang out the opening lyrics to 'Fly Me To The Moon', the word snagging her attention from her self-induced worry-spiral.  
>Looking back up and squinting from across the room, Tilly was surprised to see another nandroid standing at the microphone, shimmering dress contrasting with her dark hair. She stared, listening rapt to the song and marveling at her fellow machine's voice. Every other thought fell away for those long minutes, her mind taking in every detail of the moment in that too-shiny quality again.  
>When the song was over, she stood quickly, prompting one or two other patrons to do the same, and gave an enthusiastic standing ovation. Her mood had changed dramatically in the last few minutes, recognizing a commonality between herself and the performer which in that moment felt profound.   
>Neither one of them were doing what they were built for, they were instead following their own desires and living unusual lives never planned for in their original manufacturing. The thought of it filled her with a renewed resolve that felt like the world's fastest recharge.   
>Tilly didn't waste a moment bounding out the door, up the stairs, and drew from her extended battery life to jog all of the several mile journey back to mission control. No more trepidation occupied her as she returned, the feelings of awe and exhilaration from her first flight were still on-file, now front-and-center in her focus.   
>She was ready to go.

>Tilly was fitted with something like a space-suit, though not nearly as bulky as one designed to support a human. She needed no air pressure to hold her together like humans required, so over most of her body the material clung to her exterior tightly, an inch of insulation between her and the outside to keep her heat contained.  
>Gloves and boots were thicker with insulation, her delicate hands particularly in danger of freezing up if not kept within a certain temperature range, and her boots needed to be insulated against the cold lunar surface to prevent yet more heat loss.  
>"It's great that you're producing some of your own heat already, it'll reduce load on the heater's battery and so long as that stays charged you won't freeze up there." Georges said as he watched a pair of pad technicians clip Tilly's boots into place.  
>"And I've got one backup battery in my pack, the other in the lander." She was running the process of swapping batteries out on the suit through her mind when she paused and frowned.  
>"Without the heater, how long do you think..." She began, but didn't finish. Georges shook his head. "Ten minutes? Maybe." He met Tilly's uncertain look and shrugged. "We don't know."  
>The last piece of the suit to be fitted was a glass bubble dome that fit snugly over her head, leaving little room between her face and the glass. She liked the unrestricted view, but felt somewhat exposed.  
>"We were gonna put a sun-visor on there, but frankly we just plain ran out of time. Just, don't look directly at the sun and burn out your lenses, okay? Sterling didn't give us spares to pack."  
>Giving Georges an irritated look, she took a step towards him in her heavy new boots, reached out and plucked a dark pair of sunglasses off his shirt in response.

>Tilly had never experienced deja-vu before, but a vague understanding of it came to her when she was once again strapped into her seat by a pair of technicians. Examining the interior of the cabin, she noted it was much like the Capricorn she'd flown in before, cramped with no real standing room to speak of, and lacking many components deemed too costly to keep given the weight restraints.  
>The last pad tech stowed her few personnel affects in a compartment above her, stepped out of the capsule back onto the gantry and began to swing the hatch closed. "See you next week!" She'd said hopefully, but the two technicians had only exchanged nervous glances with each other as the hatch was fastened in place.  
>As the launch sequence ticked down minutes, then finally seconds, Tilly kept herself from overclocking by reminding herself that she had done this part before. "Everything's nominal" she said out loud both over the radio and to herself.  
>"...two, one, liftoff! There she goes, tower cleared!" The voice over the intercom was far away, overshadowed by the immense roar of the engines. This rocket was larger, both wider and taller than the missile that had carried her up before, and felt noticeably different.  
>Steadying herself with deep breaths, Tilly watched a small pocket-watch taped to the console next to the empty space originally intended for a heavier digital mission-timer, and ran through her flight checklist internally.  
>The Zeus III heavy rocket rolled at the appropriate time, picked up supersonic speed and punched through the lower atmosphere until the first stage's fuel tanks were dry. "Staging!" Tilly called over the radio as she reached forward and pressed a button.   
>Just as on her first flight, there was a loud 'BANG', but instead of the weightlessness she'd felt back then she was instead pressed harder back into her seat by the solid second stage lighting up like a giant firework. The console's accelerometer had been removed for redundancy, she had her own internal sensor for that and it currently read far below the G-forces she'd withstood on the centrifuge tests.  
>"So far, so good" She said to herself. The second separation and third stage ignition came after several more minutes, and by then Tilly was already seeing the surface far below her as the black of space took up more than half the porthole. Another timer call out by radio, another switch to flick, another small 'BANG' as protective fairings fell away from underneath the cabin unveiling the bare tanks and legs of the lander itself. She rode the third stage clear out of the atmosphere and kept going until at last the rocket burnt out, ejecting Tilly's vessel clean with a final 'POP'.  
>"Mission control, final separation is done, SELENE lander is coasting." She glanced out the porthole at the curving terrain below, and felt the weightlessness with internal gyros that no longer sent warnings during freefall. "So, where am I headed?" She added with a nervous laugh.  
>"Give us a moment" Came back the voice on the intercom, followed by several seconds of static. "Okay SELENE, we'll have a small mid-course-correction for you shortly so just sit tight". She frowned at this. The final burn sending her towards the moon was off, but the question was by how much? A vision of the lunar landscape slipping by as she drifted off into some wild orbit crossed her mind, but the intercom snapped back on and the voice of Georges came through.  
>"Alright, short duration burn of a half second, 20 hours from now, copy?." She leaned her head back against the inside of the glass bubble and sighed. A nice short 'puff' was all it was going to take to put her on target. "Copy control" She answered back, smiling to herself.   
>With the exception of that small correction, Tilly had precious little to do for the next 70 hours.  
>She'd taken her helmet off first, not needing it except to hold heat while walking on the moon, then unbuckled to float in what little room she had. Grabbing at her personal item box, she pulled out a small notebook the size of a passport, along with a similarly-sized box of short colored pencils.  
>Tilly wasn't an artist, had never so much as doodled, but when she'd asked Georges what she was supposed to do to busy herself during the two long coast phases, he'd tossed her the notebook and pencils in response. "Can't spare the mass for much more"  
>Looking out the porthole at the world below her, she first attempted to replicate the wonder she recognized in the now-familiar display before her. She drew a circle, and frowned. Crumpling the page and leaving it to float, she tried again, this time sketching slower. Another circle.  
>Several more crumpled wads of paper floated around the cabin before she recognized just what was wrong with her attempts. "Darned third dimension" she muttered, cursing in her own family-friendly way at her inability to translate visual data to paper. She wasn't about to give up though, and instead merely adopted a simpler child-like style she was comfortable with.   
>Her next attempt she saw through to completion, and drawing the continents on was easier now that she wasn't attempting to perfectly replicate the scene, merely interpreting it. It wasn't until she began adding color that she found her groove though, and once she did she'd filled in every spot of the page with blues and browns, blacks and whites, every green she had.  
>Holding her art out against the hull of the cabin next to the porthole, she compared the image to the real thing and beamed. "A masterpiece!" she proclaimed, and laughed to herself until it was time to recharge.

>Tilly's life over the next three days was one of routine, punctuated only by that minor correction burn which had been far less exciting than she'd hyped up in her mind over the hours leading to it. When she awoke from a recharge, she called home and read a series of figures back to them from the console, then settled into doodling. She'd nearly run out of things in the cramped cabin to sketch, and the last thing she drew was a wide image of the moon as she saw it below her, an image to match her drawing of the Earth.  
>Then the tedious coast phase was finished, and it was back to work. Her notebook and pencils stowed, she stuffed her failed art projects into a bag and packed it underneath her seat.  
>"SELENE you are go for first deceleration burn in sixty, on your mark." The faraway voice was harder to hear than ever now, nearly lost in static. "Copy that. Wish me luck, sirs."  
>When Tilly lit the engine, she was momentarily disoriented by the sudden deceleration after days in freefall, and had to shake off the odd sense of vertigo to focus on her readouts. After a carefully measured burn, she killed the engine and waited.  
>To her right, the porthole was beaming in more light than the small yellow bulbs in the cabin, the whole world outside was reflective white, pockmarked with endless craters. That involuntary overclocking turned on again, and for just a moment everything seemed to have a more brilliant glow. She didn't try to calm herself now, she wanted the sharper focus to stick this landing, and to record every bit of memory.  
>The first burn had slowed her, but now her lander fell almost straight down at the surface, picking up speed as it went. "Suicide-burn in 30" the intercom chattered at her. "Really wish you didn't call it that" she replied tersely.   
>At thirty seconds from impact, Tilly fed the hungry engine again and it lit up, the throttle now under her fine-tuned control. She tore her eyes from the window and focused only on her instruments, guiding by numbers and her own internal calculation alone. The lander slowed carefully under her precise hands, and just a few feet off the ground Tilly eased back on the throttle until she felt the lander rock hard and heard bits of sand and rock being blown against the bottom of the hull by the exhaust.  
>The engine snapped off, and the cabin went quiet for several seconds. "SELENE come in, are you alright? Tilly?". Aware that her mouth was hanging open, she shook off the strange daze and replied. "Uh, yes, yes sir! I'm down! SELENE on the surface!" A second delay as the signal went there and back again, then Tilly could hear cheering and applause in the faraway control room. As she turned her head, she saw the Earth again out the porthole, and smiled as she listened to the celebration out there in her little tin can.  
>The Moon. She'd never had any great fascination with it or any of the heavenly bodies before being drafted into the agency, but after that first flight she'd found herself staring at it constantly. It was seeing the Earth from up high that did it, sparked a sudden understanding beyond her simple textbook programming that an entire world rose above them each night, and one that few ever seemed to notice. After that flight, it had been impossible to get the idea out of her mind, and now mere weeks later here she was, sitting on top of it.  
>"Well, let's go meet the neighbors I guess!" She said to herself with a laugh to shake herself from the introspection, unbuckled and reached for her stowed helmet. Standing to a crouch, she unhooked herself and her suit from the ship's onboard power, switching to their own batteries. A minute later, the hatch swung open outwards, and Tilly almost lost her balance at the sight.  
>Most nandroids, and even most people, would've seen only a dead rock, hostile and unwelcoming, but Tilly felt an inexplicable connection to it after her many nights of gazing up at the night sky. Knees momentarily failing, she steadied herself against the hatch's frame. "Holy shit" she breathed out, her awe overwhelming her. Her internal censor raised no complaint, and there was nobody up here to scold her for it. Tearing her eyes off the horizon, she turned herself and worked her way down the ladder, then planted her boot. No video cameras, no microphone had been sent to record her first words, and so they were only for herself.  
>"I could stay up here forever."  
>Tilly took her time walking around the lander, admiring the brave butchered machine for getting her this far, and set out walking without thinking about it. She quickly found her footing, her training with the low-G harness back home proving useful. All it took was a properly-timed pattern of tiny leaps, and Tilly found that after a couple minute's practice she was covering ground rapidly. She slowed and bounced to a halt, glancing back over her shoulder at the tiny lander in the distance. Reminding herself that she was here to do a job, she quickly picked up several rocks lying at her feet, placing each into a plastic baggie marked 'sample'.  
>She collected half a dozen, the largest a little bigger than her fist, and stashed them in a pair of pockets at her midsection. Turning, she kept the lander to her right and always within sight as she bounded off again, again surrendering to the giddy joy of hopping along the moon. Each kick off the ground she added a little energy, seeing how high she could go. On her highest hop, she glanced down and felt a momentary panic seeing just how high she'd gone, but then a much deeper panic as she looked away to her left.  
>She'd spotted a deep crater, with steep walls that obscured all light from the center. Leading in her direction from the rim were a set of freshly-cut scores in the ground, as if something had been dragged a short ways into the crater. She stared at it transfixed and suddenly feeling very paranoid. She hit the ground hard and unprepared, tumbling forward as her legs crumpled beneath her. She felt an impact on the glass dome and opened her optics, face to face with sharp grey rock. The glass hadn't broken, but it had been enough of a scare that she wasn't going to be trying any EVA altitude records again on this trip.  
>Pushing herself to her feet, she looked in the direction of the marked crater, and squared her shoulders. Obviously she needed to see it. careful to keep her hops light, Tilly moved across the surface determined but afraid of what she might find there. She slowed as she reached the the marks on the ground and looked down at them carefully. She had no doubt now, she'd seen these same kind of marks gouged into the concrete under her test-lander back home. Something had skidded into the crater here.  
>Trying to stifle the array of eerie feelings she was having, Tilly walked slowly towards the crater rim, and stood there looking into the darkness for a full minute. Nothing happened that she could see, and so with a deep breath and steeled synthetic nerves she unclasped a small flashlight from her suit, and stepped forward off the ledge.

>She hit the curved inner wall of the crater only a couple of seconds later, falling relatively little and bending her knees to slide to a halt before walking down the slope. As soon as she crossed onto the shadowed floor, her vision blanked and she fumbled with the flashlight switch. The bright yellow beam flicked on, and Tilly saw it illuminate a face.  
>She nearly dropped the light, fumbling again to keep hold of it. She was shaking. A few yards away lay the twisted heap of a lander that looked more like the one she'd tested on than her ride here, and next to it sitting slumped under the overturned vehicle was the pilot.  
>The lander was tilted over, two of the legs buckled and one fuel tank smashed open by the crash. The cabin looked like it belonged on a bulldozer or earth-mover, it was smaller than hers even was, and on the side was an unmistakable faded red flag painted on and marked with hammer and sickle.  
>The face that had so startled her was stainless steel, and though obscured mildly by grey dust on her helmet, still gleamed under the flashlight's beam. Her black synthetic hair was buzzed nearly to stubble, what length there was to it stood up straight. Around her lay a few simple tools, and what Tilly surmised might be a broken antenna partially disassembled. Taking a few hesitant steps forwards, she knelt by the inactive robot's side and checked her glassy optics for any sign of recognition. "Power, power, where is your...aha!" she searched around the pilot's backpack and found an unmistakable battery pack, unfamiliar design but still clearly meant for the same purpose as her own.  
>She pulled the dead unit free of the pilot's pack and examined it. Once she'd gotten a good look, she determined it was very similar to her own, albeit bulkier and probably not as long-lived. Dropping the battery to the ground, she reached for her own pack and unfastened the inactive spare. The connectors were not universal, but the contacts were spaced the same and a couple of quick whacks from Tilly's gloved hand shoved it in enough for copper to meet copper. "Now please, wake up" she pleaded with the inactive machine, then opened the power flow from the battery with the press of a switch.  
>At once a blue light flashed from the pilot's optics, and when Tilly put her hand on her Soviet counterpart's chest, she felt a soft thrum even through her glove. She smiled, and after nearly half a minute, the Russian droid blinked.  
>"Hey! You're okay!" Tilly said happily, grinning with relief. She wasn't sure why, but the moment she'd laid eyes on her fellow machine lying motionless there, she'd known she was going to do everything she could to help. Maybe it was merely the notion that she was not the only spacefaring nandroid now, and that implied comradery alone had compelled her to act, or maybe it was a deeper expression of her core nurturing programming which remained unfulfilled without children to care for.  
>Strange optics focusing on Tilly, then widening with recognition, the Russian pilot stared at her in shock for a moment. Her bulkier hand tightened around the rock-pick she'd been holding when she shut down, and she swung it wildly for the nandroid with a shout Tilly saw but could not hear.  
>Tilly gave a cry and tripped backwards, the first swing missing her but then the Russian was up, launching into her and the two collided, tumbling across the bed of the lunar crater together. Their helmets touching, Tilly heard but couldn't understand the fast-paced furious speech from the other pilot, and had to grab at her hand to keep the hammer from landing a killing blow.  
>They came to a stop, the foreign pilot on top of Tilly and furiously striking at her with her free gloved hand while her weapon was immobilized. The look of hatred in her optics shook Tilly, and she shut her own to avoid meeting the menacing gaze. Not falling from the sky to the desert floor, not the near-crash of the lunar tester, not even her hurtful dressing-down by Georges, nothing scared her more than the look of fury and deadly intent the pilot wore.   
>"No!" She cried out, and with her own free hand grabbed at the ground, fingers tightening around a baseball-sized chunk of rock. With a shout, she swung upwards without looking, smashing it against the Russian's head with all her mustered force.  
>The thin glass dome did little to stop the blow, frozen faceplate steel split along the seams and cracked where the rock had struck above the audio receptor, caving inwards . The pilot had winced and put a hand to the wound, glared down at her and seized up. Tilly panted for breath as her CPU ran hotter than she'd ever felt, then shoved the immobile robot off and scooted backwards from her. The pilot slumped over without resistance, but fixed her with a piercing stare that lasted until the dim blue light behind the optics faded, and she stared at nothing.  
>Tilly sat nearly as frozen, shock seizing her as well. She felt sick, another new sensation to her. On Earth she'd tended to more than one of the ground crew after their drinking sessions, and had always wondered what could ever feel so bad that it made you regurgitate your own guts. Now she knew, and nausea wracked her with no physical outlet for it. Crawling forward on hands and knees, she stopped and reached out to hesitantly touch the offline robot, then began rifling through the pockets. 'There must be some identification' she thought to herself, distraught but trying to focus on anything besides the moment she was in. 'they're gonna wanna know who she is, was'.   
>There wasn't much there, a slip of paper with what Tilly thought might be an itinerary, the Cyrillic characters strange and unfamiliar to her. One breast pocket held a pencil-stub, which Tilly left, and the one next to it contained another folded slip of paper. When she opened it, she froze again. It was a rough pencil sketch, colorless but richly detailed, of the Earth.  
>She sat there holding the image for several minutes, looking at it with a horrid feeling she couldn't quite describe. She felt her very frame aching, and a heavy weight anchored in her midsection. A light began flashing on the outside of her suit near belt-level, and she momentarily snapped out of her grief. Her suit-heater battery was low. Turning over the deactivated pilot, Tilly strained but failed to dislodge her spare from the pack she'd jammed it into, and gave up quickly not wanting to waste what little time she had.   
>Pushing herself up, she estimated she had minutes before the heater would turn off entirely and she'd be left with only her waste heat and whatever residual lasted in the insulated suit. She looked back up the steep crater wall nervously. She'd had no plan when she came down here, and now she had to do her planning on the spot. Moving as fast as the low gravity would allow, Tilly picked up speed as she bounced across the crater floor and the foot of one slope. Putting all her weight into one last hop she threw herself, spinning slowly in mid-vacuum, over the edge of the crater wall and fell with a cry at the rim where she'd started.   
>Staring from the ground into the dark crater, she saw her flashlight still on lying on the ground inside the shadow, illuminating the crumpled form of the Russian robot. Tilly pushed to her feet and turned her back on it, then began bounding back towards the lander.

>"Gonna make it, gonna make it" She was repeating to herself as she bounce-jogged along the surface, willing herself not to keep peeking glimpses down at the battery status light. She heard a beeping in her receptors, and the gentle hum of the heater clicked off. She ignored both, optics glued on her lander.  
>The first temperature warnings came from her delicate digits, and soon more were registering internally and warning her she was quickly approaching critically-low operating temperature. "I know, I know!" her new chant transitioned from the first. Her vision blurred slightly, and Tilly realized the interior of her helmet was growing frost. Quickly-exhaled waste-heat melted a patch large enough to see through and she kept moving, covering the last hundred yards to the lander with her outer casing feeling as if it would shatter in the cold. She started for the ladder, but none of her fingers would budge.  
>Frustration and panic rising, Tilly grit her teeth and smashed her stuck right hand into one of the lander's round fuel tanks. The blow loosened the frozen fist enough for her to hook the hatch release after she'd struggled up the ladder with extremities that felt like unresponsive nubs.  
>She tumbled inside the SELENE backwards, slumping against the seat for a moment before pulling herself onto it proper. Sitting back, her suit plugged into SELENE's power supply, and she heard the suit-heater start back up.  
>"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she repeated breathlessly for a moment before falling silent. She flexed her fingers after several minutes, the sensation of control returning to them as they warmed. Tilly felt exhausted, she didn't even know she was capable of that. Today had been a day of many firsts. Suddenly remembering her mission, she checked her pockets and found her samples still present. She thought about the surface-activity checklist which had gone out the window the moment she'd spotted that crater, then looked up at the bulkhead above her at the surface camera and flag, both still stowed and forgotten entirely in her earlier awe at seeing the surface for the first time.   
>She pulled down the bulky camera, gave it a long look, and tossed it out the still-open hatch. The folded up flag followed it. "Come yourselves" she said with a tinge of bitterness she didn't recognize in herself.  
>Closing the hatch and securing it, Tilly punched the intercom switch and gave a brief, very brief, update before switching it back off entirely. "I'm coming home now."

>Tilly glided through her pre-launch checks, and dispassionately throttled up the engine once more without bothering to ask permission, gently guiding the craft upwards. When the engine finally cut out, she was high above the lunar surface, far from the crashsite that occupied her mind, and yet much farther still from home. Flicking the radio back on, she caught half of a repeated request for a response before she answered it curtly with a request of her own, her trajectory readings.  
>"SELENE! There you are! You're...hold on." Tilly waited silently, looking down at the intercom but really looking through it at nothing. "Return course looks fine, but Tilly what happened? Why did you turn off your intercom?" Suddenly she didn't know what to say, hadn't even thought about how to explain. She trembled in her seat, and shook her head slowly. "I'm fine, it's fine, I have your samples." she said in a shaky voice, reaching up for her breast pocket unthinking.  
>The intercom operator went silent for a moment, then the voice of Georges came through the channel. "Tilly, what's wrong?" he sounded genuinely worried, and that somehow made her feel worse. "Comms-check in a few hours" she said quickly, and snapped the radio off again. Unfastening from her seat, She took off her helmet and let it float around the cabin with her before pulling the crumpled black and white drawing out of her pocket. She had no tears to be shed, but Tilly sobbed anyway, pulling her legs close to her chest as she floated at the center of the cabin. The Russian's sketch floated beside her, turning slowly in mid-air.  
>She had three more days of coasting, and spent most of them going between recharge and silent thought, merely waiting passively as she spent hours staring out the window. She never touched her pad and pencils. "This is all your fault you know" the voice of the agency Director played back from her memory. Would the Soviets have tried sending a robot if she hadn't flown? Would they have tried unprepared for the moon if she hadn't declared her intentions on national television? She thought about the crashed lander, and concluded it had been too small to even make the return, and must have been sent on a rushed one-way trip. "I wonder if she got to call home before..." The cabin heater was running fine, but still Tilly felt cold, and even looking down through the window at the growing Earth couldn't warm her.  
>"Sixty minutes until re-entry SELENE. Tilly, are you sure you're okay for this?" Georges had asked on the third day, as Earth took up most of the view out the porthole. She had dodged any serious questions in the brief communication during the coast, and people in the control room were getting anxious as to why.  
>"Yes sir, I've got this. Just watch for the shooting star." She smiled sadly to herself, the first time in days, and reattached her helmet. Putting her gear in order, she made sure her samples were stowed in her suit pockets, and pocketed Georges' unused sunglasses to return to him. She left the notepad and pencils where they were stowed, but pocketed her own childish drawing of the Earth. Looking down, she tapped her breast pocket and felt the crumpled paper there too, secure. She turned the handle on the hatch and it swing silently outwards. In all her training, she'd not given any serious consideration to performing an EVA, how hard could it be? she assumed it to be a simple maneuver, and so nervously tethered herself with a carabiner to the outside of the lander.  
>Holding on tightly, she maneuvered herself out of the cabin and her legs floated freely away from it. She was outside in space. A momentary rush of something like vertigo gripped her, and she squeezed tight to hold on while she got herself under control.  
>She swung her dangling legs back around and clung to the skin of the lander, inching over to a covered panel. She pulled away the curved metal plate which gave easily, and let it spiral away from her without care. Inside was something that looked like a stretcher fitted to a disc slightly larger than a sled tucked inside a foil bag, paired with two pressurized tanks and a parachute to be held by the pilot while the bag was pressured.  
>Reluctantly, Tilly climbed into the NOOSE, and when she was sure she was secure, shoved off from the SELENE. Before pulling the material closed around her, she took one last look at the lander as she drifted away from it, thanked it silently, then sealed herself inside. Orienting the packed chute at chest-level, she depressurized the two bottles and an expanding white foam filled the bag, sealing her in and choking off the view.  
>The outside of her sealed coffin formed a curved edge as it filled and hardened, taking on the profile of a heat-shield. Checking with her internal chronometer, Tilly estimated another 45 minutes until re-entry would begin. She felt like holding her breath the entire time. With no view, all she could do was sit in the darkness and close her eyes.  
>Her reckoning was right, and confirmed when the absurd device began shaking, atmosphere slowly thickening as she entered the top of the sky. "Four minutes, just four more minutes" she said out loud to herself, feeling helpless in the dark without any instruments but her own internal sensors. The shaking grew severe, and at the halfway point Tilly was experiencing more Gs than even on the centrifuge. Her frame strained, and she thought she felt micro-fissures forming in her steel. even her eyelids felt heavy, and so she left them closed with nothing to see anyway. She had a ringing in her everything as the little pod began to rock less violently and after another half a minute, only a persistent vibration remained.   
>She couldn't believe the thing had worked, but remained focused on her chronometer ticking down the seconds.   
>If she deployed her parachute too early, it would be ripped apart before it could slow her down any, and she wouldn't even see the ground coming this time. Too late, and she'd hit the ground still trying to slow down as on her first flight. So she waited, overclocking to time her altitude right by computer-controlled reckoning. When she was sure, she pulled the ripcord and a small charge blew the cover and chute free of the brittle foam and enclosure surrounding it. Peeking open one optic halfway, she saw a column of sunlight on her chest, could hear the billowing parachute fully deploying above her.   
>She drifted down for several more minutes, relaxing during the descent. She wasn't going to be able to avoid questions for very much longer, she was going to have to explain herself soon. The jolt of impact shook her back to the moment, and the hardened foam cracked around her. She'd hit the ground only somewhat slower than her first rough landing, but this time there had been a burnt heat sheild and the foam to crumple under her, cushioning her fall.  
>She waited for a moment, feeling suddenly very still for the first time in days. Reaching out through the jumble of light rubble the foam had shattered into, she found the enclosure seal and pulled until it gave way. She forced herself out of the broken NOOSE and stood, brushing bits of the crumbled foam off before going to work removing her helmet. She unclasped the fasteners at her wrists next, then ankles, dropping her gloves to the ground and stepping out of her boots welcome to be free of the stifling things after a week of wearing them. A spotter plane soared far overhead, and Tilly looked up at it squinting. She pulled George's sunglasses from her pocket and slipped them on, blocking the bright sun from her optics with one hand as she watched the plane high among the clouds. She felt her short hair move in the breeze for the first time in a week, and sighed happily on the open landscape.  
>She was home. 

EPILOGUE

>"Alright, so just what in the hell happened up there?" The Director sat at his desk, wearing a concerned expression modeled on his old face.  
>Tilly sat across from him in his office, hands clasped in her lap. The mission itinerary looted from the Soviet pilot's suit lay on the desk between them.  
>She told him everything, once she'd begun it had been impossible to hold back and the words had just spilled out of her. It felt good for someone else to know, she thought.  
>The Director sat silently, absorbed in her tale with an unreadable look on his face. After telling him of getting back to the lander, she stopped, there wasn't much else to tell.  
>The elder man sat for a long moment, staring down at his desk before speaking. "Who else knows about this?" he asked reservedly.  
>Tilly shook her head. "I didn't, I mean, this is the first I've spoken about it" she answered him, suddenly unsure of herself. He looked up sharply at her.  
>"Make it the last. I mean it." She blinked at him in confusion. "Sir?"  
>Turning in his chair, the director sighed. "The Russians never claimed their landing, even now they're going with the 'dummy moon-shot' explanation, a cover for the crash that lets them claim a success out of failure."  
>Tilly looked horrified, thinking of the shattered bits of stainless steel and glass lying in the dust next to the dead pilot up there still. Nobody was even going to acknowledge that she'd been the first?   
>"National security" He said quickly, seeing her distressed expression. "If we call them on this bluff the consequences could be, well, you know what state the world is in right now"  
>She did not, her original training had been limited to a very specific skill, and even now she was operating well outside of that. The rest of the world was still new, and unpleasantly more prickly than she'd expected it to be.  
>Resigning to the man's questioning gaze, she looked down and nodded sullenly. "Yes, sir." The Director's harsh expression softened approvingly, and he gave her a sad little smile. "Get some recharge, you've got free-time to kill."  
>As she was leaving, the Director spoke up again suddenly, remembering something he'd forgotten in favor of more important news. "What happened to the camera? You didn't bring back any images."  
>Tilly stood in the doorway for a moment, her back to him. Without turning, she shrugged. "Radiation-shielding failure, all the film was junk".  
>After leaving the Director's office, now sworn to secrecy on the matter of the Russian pilot, she wandered the complex aimless for a while unsure of how to react to it.  
>She found herself in front of the vehicle assembly building, the tall rectangular structure housing new rockets in their larval stage. A long series of stairways led her up the side of the building, all the way to the roof.  
>The sun had set during her climb, and only a scant few spotlights on the ground dimmed her view of the stars. Tilly first sat, then laid flat on her back to look up folding her hands behind her head.  
>She had plenty of charge left in her battery, and too much on her mind to want to go into rest-mode now, so she stayed up there, watching as the pattern of stars slowly arced over the sky above her.   
>She was acutely aware, maybe more than any of her model, just how small she was, and how large the world around her felt by comparison. The moon finally rose and passed her field of view, and she stared at it pensive.  
>Though still beautiful in her optics, the feeling she'd had about it before her second flight eluded her now, the wonder of the unknown world up there tainted by her experience on it.  
>She let her gaze fall away from the bright orb and refocus to the blackness behind it. Optical lenses slowly let in more light as they refocused on the darkness, and after mere moments she was seeing the backdrop of the milky way.  
>For just a while that evening, Tilly was able to smile and forgot the myriad complications that had entered her life, staring upwards at a small persistently red point of light set against the others in the night sky.


	3. Tatyana's First Flight

>"This one....'Tatyana' " A portly man had said to a timid line-manager as they passed the immobile robot during a factory inspection, the machine standing motionless in a line with fifty more of near-identical build. "Have it packaged and ready to ship out before I leave."  
>One of the many perks of his position, the large man had thought to himself as he left the building, was how many people below him were unwilling to ever say 'no'. A free mechanical nanny was a small price to pay in order to keep the Commandant of the Union's spaceflight development happy.  
>The robotic nanny, a recent development made after studying western designs, had been shipped by train to the home of the Commandant, a short thick man of advanced years yet retaining sharp predator's eyes.   
>Her first memory had been of her initial boot-up, a nearly two minute process, in the elder man's home attended-to by a round woman and two curious children. The home, if you could call it that then, was dark and cluttered, and Tatyana noted the years of obvious neglect before anything else.  
>The youngsters had been bashful at first, but at Tatyana's first smile and offer of a hug they'd nearly tackled her to the rug, their parents warmly looking on from a distance. Before the inevitable housekeeping began, she'd cherished this warm moment and would play the memory back to herself fondly on darker days.  
>The household needed quite a bit of care, the Commandant's wife was nearly as elderly as himself, and the two had been blessed late in their lives by a pair of orphans adopted to give their home a renewed sense of life.  
>Tatyana relished the opportunity, nearly breaking herself in her first week to catch up on years worth of neglect and disrepair around the house. It satisfied her greatly to see a decrepit pile of laundry washed and neatly folded, or a disused and dusty closet brought back to original function again.  
>It had taken a month, but the determined robot had turned the dank and dismal hovel back into a warm and inviting home, and it made her proud to have contributed to her master's lives. One evening after tucking the boys into bed, she'd descended the stairs, discovering her masters huddled around the tiny television at the heart of the room.  
>She moved forward and stopped just behind the couch, looking between them curiously at the black and white screen. A news broadcaster was telling them about an American achievement, one in her master's field. As she watched, she learned more, as had often been the case when he brought his work home with him, explaining to her various facets of the program in venting tirades she nonetheless found fascinating.  
>According to the US media, one of their 'nandroids' had been shot off on a missile, and had orbited once before performing what they were calling a 'high-speed landing'. "Sounds like she bit the dust hard" Tatyana said with a tinge of smugness owning to her programming. American-anything performed shoddily, this was merely another confirmation of her built-in bias.  
>"SHH!" The Commandant shushed her, listening intently to the small television even after the news piece had concluded. Finally he shook his bald head. "They cheated." he said flatly, then sprang up with force. "THEY FUCKING CHEATED!"  
>Tatyana winced as the furious man kicked over the coffee table, sending newspapers and magazines flying. "It's not goddamned fair!" Fuming, the elder man caught his breath for a few moments, clearly overexerted. His wife dutifully stood with him, trying to soothe him with a "dear" and light back rub.  
>The Commandant shook her off, grabbed his coat off the standing rack and walked out the front door, giving it a slam behind him without another word. Tatyana and the Commandant's wife stood silent for a long moment, neither knowing what to say.  
>Eventually, the plump woman put on a forced smile and cleared her throat loudly. "Tatyana dear, would you give me a hand with the coffee table?"

>The master of the house had been gone for several weeks without word, which was not uncommon as his work often took him many hours away by train. Always though, he would call at least once to let them know he was coming home, so when he walked through the doorway without warning one evening three sets of eyes and one pair of lenses stared at the Commandant as he stood in the entrance.  
>"Dear, where-" the elder woman's voice was cut off, the Commandant didn't even look at her. "Tatyana. You have a job to perform." He said this tersely, hands clasped behind his back in a stance that said 'official party business'.  
>Rising from the block tower she'd been erecting with the twins on the living-room floor, she stood at attention and matched his official stance. "What would you have me do, sir?" She asked, ready for instruction. His demeanor unnerved her though, at home he was not like this, but she hid her apprehension from her family.   
>The Commandant breathed in deeply and sighed, not deviating his gaze from Tatyana. "The Agency requires a mechanical pilot to perform an extremely important flight. I have opted you specifically." he said gruffly, fixing her with a gaze that told her this was non-negotiable. She was confused, but didn't show it. Why her? She knew only the basics of her master's work, and that was merely a happy accident.  
>One of the twin boys clung at her leg, looking back at their half-built block tower. "No!" the child whined at first, then huffed angrily. "When are you gonna be back?" His brother sat by the short block tower looking at Tatyana, obviously concerned as well but letting the bolder of the two ask the question.  
>Tatyana glanced from her young charges back to her master expectantly. The man fixed her with a dark gaze, and imperceptibly shook his head. Feeling the steel cable of her spinal support shiver involuntarily, Tatyana went cold. She'd always known that she was essentially expendable, all of her mechanical comrades had the self-sacrifice impulse hardwired into them. Still, now at the moment she called upon it, the programmed imperative was only somewhat motivating. She composed herself and smiled back at the twins.  
>"Just as soon as I'm able, you just keep building. And no fighting, da?" The boys looked at her worriedly, unsure of why the statement felt off to them, but then the boy holding her leg released her and nodded. "Okay, see you later Tatyana!"

>Tatyana rode a train several hours with her master, remaining silent for nearly all of the trip as he'd initially dodged any questions she'd asked about her assignment. The silence bothered her, as soon as she'd seen the expression on the Commandant's face in the living room she'd givenin to the notion that this job was in all possibility her last, and she at least wanted details of what might be coming.  
>They'd finally arrived at an imposing station, soaring columns holding back the roof over the train platform from gravity's endless pull. She'd walked with him silently, then was picked up by car and rode in equal silence over several more hours to a complex hidden away deep in the desert.  
>"Is this the Cosmodrome?" Tatyana finally broke the unbearable silence in the backseat of the car as they approached the launch complex, her voice low and reverent. "Da." came the single-word response from the Commandant, his eyes focused somewhere far beyond the view out the window. She'd heard him speak of the place before, but seeing it up close made her stare up at the imposing structures around her in a sort of awe, nearly tripping as she followed her master.  
>Inside she'd walked quickly with the Commandant past many curious faces all the way to a cramped meeting room buried in the complex. She breathed in, and her olfactory sensors detected stale coffee, cigar smoke, alcohol, and black mold. She remained silent about the latter, clearly whatever she was here for was far more important than tidying up this dismal excuse for a meeting room.  
>After she'd taken a seat nearest the Commandant at a dirty round table, a succession of old men and young, grim and determined, had entered in small groups and taken their seats around the table.  
>When at last the seats were filled, Tatyana's master stood before them to speak, all eyes focusing on him dutifully. "They think they've beaten us," he began, folding his arms behind his back. He didn't have to specify, the successful first orbit by the American robot had been the bane of their working lives since it happened. What optimism there had been ran dry after their first disastrous attempt to surpass the Americans just days later with a doomed human pilot, but none were permitted to speak of it.  
>Tatyana shifted in her seat, uncomfortable and feeling out of place. Why she wasn't tucking the boys in and reading them a bedtime story to send them off to sleep right now? What 'important flight' could they need her for?  
>"The Americans think they're on top now, that they've got the best machines" the old man continued. He was pacing around the room, agitating all who waited on his word. Several men from the last such meeting were not present, and would not be again.  
>"Just because they send a robot up, this means they've suddenly won?" His voice rose. "Orbit is NOTHING! We should be looking FURTHER, pushing new boundaries!" The old man's patriotism took on a frantic edge. Nobody pointed out their failure to even achieve that supposedly-inconsequential goal.  
>"We should shoot for the Moon itself, land there and show the capitalist pigs what TRUE engineering is capable of!" his voice reached a crescendo, and despite the speech ringing hollow nobody dared to object. Tatyana sat in shock. This was what she was here to do? They needed to to upstage that silly ginger robot? She narrowed her focus. 'If that overpriced child's toy can do it, then I know I certainly can'

>So it was that the Soviet moon-shot program began, running before they could walk. Tatyana was put through endurance tests in a centrifuge, spending hours at high-G to gather data on how long she could remain operational under the intense acceleration. She was fitted with weight-calibrated pool-floats and tossed into a swimming pool, the buoyancy roughly equaling the moon's lower gravity as she bounced around the bottom of the long pool for hours, growing accustomed to the unnatural slowness it gave to her movements.  
>Lander training had been the hardest to simulate, they had no test vehicle assembled and so the agency had accepted simply putting her through her paces on a large simulator, which she ran through dozens of times without really feeling she'd had a grasp of it. Without any feedback on her internal accelerometers, with her gyroscopes telling her she was still on the ground, an additional dimension of controlling the vehicle was lost. Tatyana's mastery of the simulated landing did not reassure her that she had learned much.  
>Not long into training, she was fetched midway through a flight-exam by a soldier and led to the central control area, an array of squat beige computers and several large projector screens in a wide darkened room.  
>Projected on one of them was the face of an American-style nandroid wearing a blue jumpsuit seated on a couch, beside her a desk with a suited man sitting behind it. The image was paused on the smiling image of the nandroid, and remained so until men stopped entering the small room.  
>The video played, and the audio rang out in English through the high-ceiling room. "Well Johnny, What I really want to do, and I think I can do it, is land on the moon!"  
>The video cut out, and faces around the room were conferring with one another. The Commandant stood before them and waited half a minute for his men to digest this directed threat from the Americans. "We must move even quicker now, no breaks. Sleep in shifts of two hours, eat at your stations while solving problems, do your calculating while you shit." at the skeptical looks of the men he stiffened and raised his voice.  
>"If they've got that machine on television to say that now, then they MUST be closer than we thought!" Finally shouting, he waved his hands to shoo them out of the room. "Get moving, NOW! Not a moment to waste!"

>The day had come quickly, it had been well over a month since the West had paraded success in their faces, and now was the day they'd finally even the score in this space race.  
>Tatyana gave a groan as the belts hooked her hard into the lander's seat. The mission profile had horrified her when she'd first heard it, but she had restrained herself from thoughtlessly objecting, as if an outburst now might snatch away this chance at a place in the history of her homeland. She imagined herself shoveling a latrine in Siberia instead while some other robot flew away on her rocket, and shuddered.  
>The flight had been planned to be as direct as was able, straight for the moon regardless of their inexperience. After launch, she'd stage to a full-burn course for the moon and skip trying to orbit entirely, after all the yankee robot had already gone and taken the glamour out of it so why waste the fuel?  
>After coasting to the moon, Tatyana's mission was to slow down and land, it didn't matter where so long as she came to a stop on the surface. "Once there," the Commandant had said boomingly when first explaining it to her. "You will plant our flag, and radio home your glorious success! You will be a national hero!"  
>Tatyana remained unfazed, a bad feeling having sat with her since seeing the still under-construction tiny lander. "And then, sir?" she'd asked in an even voice. The elder man put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her sullenly. "Sometimes, we are asked to make sacrifices, Tatyana." And there it was, she thought, nodding without a word as any doubt about her fate fell away.  
>No consolation about her greater part in human affairs mattered to her after that, she simply didn't know and didn't care. She was given her task, and she would perform it. "That presumptive, shoddy pile of junk " Tatyana said out loud to herself on the launchpad, preoccupied as she checked over the final figures on her lander's console. She resented the American nandroid, her stupid smiling face everywhere she looked. She'd already orbited before them, then that carrot-topped glitch had the nerve to try preempting them to the moon too?

>She shook her head inside her glass helmet, marveling at the naivety of her American rival. "We'll just see who can really 'do it'." Tatyana had muttered under her breath aggressively during the pre-flight checks. The image of the red-headed outmode had been plastered across newspapers for weeks, and every time Tatyana had seen the image she'd grown more outraged by her. What gave this obsolete scrap the right to upstage an entire nation of people? To try doing it twice? She burned with indignation.  
>"Sixty seconds TRIUMPH" The control room addressed her by her lander's given name. "Da, standing by for launch" she answered automatically. She'd drilled the launch sequence enough times that she felt she could perform this part during the unconscious bliss of recharge.  
>"Ten seconds, nine, eight..." Tatyana let the lids close over her optics. This would be the last time she'd be on the Earth. She had no illusion now that she'd be coming back, despite the Commandant's insistence that a retrieval mission proposal would be submitted to the annual budget meeting in a few months.  
>Distracting herself from her resigned fate, she tapped at her breast pocket, where a folded list of her duties post-launch rested securely. "Duty" she said resolutely to herself as the voice over the radio ticked down to zero.  
>The launch was the most frightening thing Tatyana had ever experienced, every internal sensor meant to help her navigate the world was screaming out at her that everything was wrong. An internal prompt tried to reboot her apparently thinking she was malfunctioning, and she had to turn off the automatic protocol mentally. She shut her eyes tight and whined quietly as the G-forces increased. The solid N2 rocked pierced the top of the heavens and didn't stop burning even as two stages dropped from it in succession.  
>The entire time, Tatyana kept her optics closed, unsure of what to expect as she was held back in her seat by the acceleration. When the violent noise and shudder of the third stage shut off with the final "BANG" of separation, Tatyana held her breath. Was that it? Was it done?  
>"TRIUMPH respond." The voice over the radio sounded farther away than anything she had heard before, and Tatyana was forced to gaze out the window back at the source of the transmission. It seemed so small from up here, she thought, then hurriedly replied.  
>"TRIUMPH lander responding, 80 hours from landing, all figures nominal." She read back the optimal report to the ground staff. Over the radio she heard cheering, and a muffled version of the national anthem being played for ground control. She sighed and let herself stare out the porthole again, longer this time. It really was beautiful, da?  
>During the coast Tatyana thought a long time about what stresses the mysterious forces of geopolitics had imposed on her happy household, about her master's dour face every night that he came home after some failure or missed milestone, about being away from her boys now. Shaking her head, she decided these kinds of thoughts were above her station in life, that they were best left to the humans whom they impacted the most.  
>After many hours of boredom, Tatyana had a sudden idea, and pulled a printed manual on landing procedures from the compartment above her head. She didn't need the directions really, and thankfully the binder had been left with several blank pages for keeping additional notes.  
>In her life back home, she'd had hours of downtime between the twins heading off to school and returning, finding little to do once the house had been put in order. She'd absentmindedly picked up doodling one day after drawing a succession of silly faces on the brown paper lunch-bags of her two young charges. It hadn't been difficult for her, and she'd found transitioning from basic smiley faces to more detailed reproductions relatively easy.  
>Pulling a spare page from the binder, Tatyana stared out the window for a long moment, taking in the sight and committing it to memory. Slowly at first, then with a fierce determination, she filled in every detail she was able to reproduce, working with an increasing determination. At last the sketch of her homeworld was finished, and she held it out against the window to compare the images.  
>"Artistic glory!" She said out loud to herself with exaggerated bravado that mimicked her often-grandiose master, then laughed at herself loudly. It felt good to laugh. 20 hours remained before her landing.

>"Slowdown-burn complete, landing in two minutes." She read off the figures from her lander's console, unable to keep from peeking glimpses at the side window while she should have been focused on the computer. The grey lunar landscape rose up beneath her tiny craft. "One minute" she read off, nodding slowly to herself. Yes, she had this, and that chintzy American 'bot would be forgotten in history's dustbin. At least she could do that much, she thought to herself, at least it will count for something.  
>As the bare-bones lander neared the surface, Tatyana checked her dials again and realized with a start that she'd picked up significant horizontal momentum without noticing. The ground rushed up at her and she could see her sideways motion now. In a flash of momentary blind panic she jerked the control stick hard to try compensating. The lander turned sharply, tumbling end over end several times as the engine continued to burn. The horizontal drift increased even as the overall speed slowed.  
>"NYET!" she shouted as the vehicle spun, and turned off the flow of fuel to the engine. It cut out at once, and the lander twirled towards the ground soundlessly. "RCS, where are you, AH!" Tatyana searched the console and hurriedly activated a switch, only to hear all reaction thrusters fire simultaneously, venting her limited mono-propellant fuel in all directions. "Nyet, NYET!"  
>The lander had been slowed nearly enough for a landing, and even with the sideways-tumble and lack of thrust wasn't going a significant speed. Two legs of the lander touched first, buckling with a sickening metallic groan and stopping the spin as the lander gouged its way a few yards across the landscape, kicking up plumes of dust.  
>"Please, please, please" Tatyana was chanting to herself, preservation-programming running rapidfire in her mind as the vehicle shook around her. Looking forward through the viewport, her core suddenly felt chilled. She could measure her momentum internally, calculate the distance to the crater ahead, and knew at once where her wounded craft was headed.  
>TRIUMPH lurched over the rim of the crater with Tatyana hanging on for dear life inside, turning as it fell towards the shadowed crater floor. It made one full revolution before striking the ground on the damaged legs, and one of the fuel tanks crumpled as it impacted hard and came to a rest, sitting with two legs poking out above the ground and the other two broken to bits. Tatyana stayed still a full minute before daring to move. The lander's internal battery was leaking power, dropping charge faster than she was consuming it. With reluctance, she unplugged and switched to her backpack's battery.  
>"Is what it is" She said to herself grimly, and bitterly began to calculate her remaining internal battery life. With some strain against the distorted metal, the hatch opened and she had an unobstructed view of the shadowed crater from inside. "Egh" she made a disgusted sound, seeing nothing but black from within the darkness. At the height of her vision she could see the rim, lit with sunlight, but it seemed so far away to her now. Switching on her suit's sewn-in flashlight, she grimly began looking around her wrecked lander to assess her situation.  
>The transmitter, she discovered, was smashed apart on impact, and the antenna broken off at the base. She carefully unscrewed the component from the dying lander and tried to repair it, but it was no use. Her knowledge of electronics wasn't insubstantial and she thought she might have been able to get it working again, but the few tools she'd been sent with were primitive and limited, nothing that could help her regain communication with the Earth.  
>She tried for another hour to eek out some miracle from the transmitter anyway, but only frustrated herself to near-madness. After what seemed like a lifetime she stood up sharply and balled her fists, screaming incoherently upwards to nothing but herself. She felt shaken by her outburst, but there had been no real release of her hopeless frustration.  
>Feeling suddenly very small and very foolish, she sat back down, and leaned her back against the underside of the upturned lander. She'd known that this was supposed to be a one-way trip, and she'd been able to make some peace with that, but being unable even to tell her master that she'd made it? That she was alive but dying on the moon, that he'd finally beaten his bitter rival with his own children's nanny?  
>It made her laugh and sob in unison, the sheer nonsense of her situation. A low buzz sounded from the suit's heater, and suddenly she felt very tired. Looking inwards at her internal battery, she saw she had about 15% of her store of power remaining, the suit itself having mere minutes left to run the heater.  
>She frowned, and closed her eyes. She thought back to seeing the American nandroid grinning on the television of her cozy household, thought of the boys playing with their blocks and toy trucks on the living room floor, thought of the pantry she'd so neatly organized for the Mrs. not so long ago, and the fireplace the family had gathered around once she'd brought it back to life. She played back the memory of meeting the children for herself once, then stopped it after feeling a sharp pang of sudden grief from the replay.  
>Groaning pitifully, she banged her head back against the glass in anguish. She wanted to go home, she missed her family, she hadn't ever wanted any of this! And it was all that American robot's fault. Tatyana ground her synthetic teeth. SHE had been the reason her master had been so rushed to match the Americans! She bristled, and pounded the ground once with the rockhammer she still held. "IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT! DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU WORTHLESS THING!" again Tatyana raged at the darkness madly, needing any sort of release she could get from her emotional overload. Her suit heater turned off.  
>She breathed heavily, her weak CPU taxed to limit by the weight of her experience. She looked up over the rim of the crater again, now at the Earth above it, hanging in the blackness forever out of her reach. She laughed again, sobbed once more, then went quiet. With a final internal look at her quickly dying power, she initiated a self-shutdown to preserve what little energy she had left.   
>"Who knows" she thought to herself wryly as first her body shut down, then her external senses. "That recovery mission could still come one day, da?"

EPILOGUE

>"TRIUMPH this is mission control, respond." The call had been put out every five minutes on the lander's private channel for over two hours after the scheduled landing before the broadcasts ceased, no answer ever coming back. The Commandant had watched sullenly until the effort was abandoned, then silently stood and left to shut himself away in his office. He was angry yes, but tired, oh so tired, and it dulled the edge of his frustration.  
>Two failures in a row, he thought, first the woman who'd burned up in that desperate hail-Mary attempt to surpass the American robot, now his own family maid had been lost in his attempt to preempt the rival agency to the moon. The first failure was not publicly-known, the agency and State had both denied it at first, then settled on explaining the launch away as a mere sounding rocket, though rumors had still persisted.  
>This failure too would have to be covered up, were it all to go public he was sure he'd find himself stationed in Siberia permanently, or very briefly stationed against a wall blindfolded. He struggled alone for a few minutes before mentally rewinding and taking the problem from the top. The Americans knew there had been a launch, there was no covering that up, and they were likely going to know that something had hit the moon.  
>"That's it" he said to himself with a nod, taking a cigar from his desk drawer and cutting the tip. Pulling a heavy zippo lighter from his coat-pocket, he lit it and puffed thoughtfully. "We hit the moon FIRST." It was a hollow victory he thought, picturing his family maid in her crimson flight suit. "That's all anyone needs to know". The Commandant picked up his phone and had his line connected with the editor at Pravda to issue a statement.


	4. Tilly's Third Flight

>After Tilly's journey to the moon and back, the public had been eager to see their all-American robot triumphantly return to their television screens nationwide, but the Agency had been careful to regulate her appearances this time around.  
>Tilly made no more live televised appearances, only being presented in a series of short pre-recorded interviews, and always with an Agency handler just off-camera. She was, effectively, muzzled.   
>Somehow even less interesting than her first media tour, Tilly gave the answers she had been instructed to without ever feeling it, and the resulting interviews lacked any spark to make them entertaining television. How many times could someone answer a question like 'how was it like up there?' anyway?  
>A few more interviews were conducted for print publications, but by then several months had passed and the story had begun to slip from the public eye already when it was completely occulted by news of a Soviet success in space.  
>Shocking the world, the USSR had launched their newly-proven N2 rocket with a human on board, mirrored Tilly's lunar-direct flight, and had successfully touched on the surface. Not only had they managed to put a human in space, but also plant their flag and drive a flimsy rover on the moon before anyone else.  
>News of the mission attempt had only come after the successful landing itself, and with images and audio from the pilot grabbing the attention of the world Tilly found her last scheduled interview indefinitely postponed by a magazine she'd never heard of anyway.  
>That evening she'd been returned late from her final canceled media appearance to mission control by a Greyhound bus, and had gone up to the VAB roof as had become habit since her last return from space. Staring up at the moon that evening, imagining a Russian man struggling to walk up there, she had mixed feelings. Obviously, the Agency and her in particular had been upstaged, yet she couldn't help but feel an odd sense of pride that a human had now followed in two sets of nandroid boot-prints.

>"How in the hell did we not see this coming?!" The greying Director was red in the face, but looking more bewildered than furious. The meeting had been assembled the morning after news had broke, all work stopping while the principal players in the agency convened and reassessed.  
>"They're not exactly transparent about their activities." Georges spoke up dejectedly. "This guy might not even be the first human they've flown, and we'd never know it." Privately, Georges believed the unsubstantiated rumor of at least one lost cosmonaut, based solely on his own bias against their national rival.  
>After the successful nandroid-piloted landing and return, the Agency had once again found itself flush with fresh government funds, but lacking an obvious next goal to spend it on beyond pushing for a similar manned lunar flight to merely catch up with their rival nation. The Director had been partial to developing a lunar outpost, but the rest of his team was mixed in opinion, and he knew that a moon-base wasn't as headline-grabbing to the public as it would be to himself. Some of the mission-planners had pointed to Mars, others Venus, and at least one voice in the room simply wanted an orbiting telescope, though that suggestion was shouted down as being 'decidedly un-sexy'.  
>The meeting was long and at times loud, enough for Tilly to eavesdrop in as she laid on the floor of her tiny suite in front of the grated air-vent there. She hadn't been included naturally, wouldn't be unless a mission was chosen that required a more sophisticated mechanical pilot than the crude probes they were developing now.  
>"Life support on the Libra capsule is still easily six months out and even then that'd barely be enough for a manned lunar flyby, not to mention that we've only just started on a real lander and that's another 8 months out at a BARE minimum" she heard the voice of the Director echo up through the vent shafts, nearly imperceptible to human ears up here.  
>"So we're stuck with unmanned probes, but the automatic guidance is giving us hell so we're still a ways' off from that even." the voice of another engineer added. Georges voice, louder than the others spoke up. "So we use Tilly again, what's the problem?" She felt a spark up her spinal supports at the mention of her name. Internally estimating the odds that she would fly again, she found the values shifting rapidly in her favor.  
>Despite her brushes with permanent deactivation, even her recently sullen state couldn't dampen the promise of excitement she knew she'd experience again if she were allowed to fly once more. "Use her on what?" another engineer interjected, and she heard Georges groan as several voices talked over one another and made it difficult for her to distinguish words.  
>Even an entire floor away and through the vents, Tilly winced at Georges' characteristic shrill whistle, and the voices quieted down. "We've got a Zeus III-B ready to go and that gives us options, if we pause all other spacecraft development and build another Capricorn capsule variant it could be ready a hell of a lot sooner than you're all talking about". There was more crossfire-arguing, but the voices were more subdued and inaudible.   
>After an indecipherable near-minute, the Director spoke up loudly. "Enough" He said sounding tired, then Tilly heard a coin strike a metal surface. "There,"  
>"Venus it is."

>Mars of course had been advocated for by nearly half the staff there including Tilly herself, who'd made the red wandering light in the sky into a familiar friend she looked forward to spotting at night. The fuel requirements however, left the proposed craft with a dangerously small margin of error, and Venus not only required less but was also in better alignment to launch much sooner.  
>"What's interesting about Venus?" Tilly had said dejectedly when she'd been informed of her next assignment as presumptive pilot for a flyby of the morning-star. In her now-ample free time, Tilly had often used an on-grounds telescope to view the sky at night, greatly multiplying the amount of distant light her optics could take in at once. Mars was blurry even to her precise vision, but the defined white poles and strange dark patches had stirred her speculation far more than the featureless yellow disk of Venus.  
>"That's what you're going out there to find out!" Georges answered with a smile, the pair walking across tarmac away from a wide set of open hanger doors. The walk to the assembly building was brief, but Tilly filled it with questions. "You won't have to learn any of that stuff, the sensor arrays just collect data then you relay it home, simple as." His explanation eased one worry, but the next in the cue quickly rose to her focus.   
>"What did you mean when you said the trip would be short for me, when the flight time is almost a year?" He raised a hand to her dismissively. "We'll have you linked into the capsule so we can regulate your shutdowns and bootups. You can spend most of the flight offline, we really only need you active for mid-course corrections and the flyby itself, and re-entry home of course." Tilly blinked and looked up at him sharply.   
>An image of her deactivated body sitting in a capsule stuck forever going around the sun because of a busted antenna flashed across her CPU in milliseconds. "If it's all the same to you sir, I'd much rather rely on my own internal clock for that, I can automate a timed reboot myself and frankly," she looked down, uncomfortable. "I know my chronometer has the Sterling guarantee, no offense. Besides, I kind of want to be there for at least some of the trip, you know?"  
>Georges frowned as they neared the VAB. "Tilly, that could potentially be a LOT of uptime for you." He sounded not quite concerned, but a little nervous. "The cabin is tiny and you'd be in there a year, we ah..." He trailed off and looked away. "We tried getting some data from Sterling on the effects of long-duration isolation tests in AI, but they wouldn't even acknowledge Stress Testing existed until the third call and when we finally got transferred through, they told us it was proprietary data and hung up."  
>Her frame gave an involuntary shudder at the mention of what the other nandroids of her class had whispered about in hushed rumors, a sort of robot hell. "So, you and the others don't know what could happen if I have too much uptime to myself?" Tilly elbowed him lightly. "I spend plenty of my uptime alone as it is, I wouldn't worry about it too much sir." She tried to remain confident as her words, but truthfully she had no idea what a year alone might do to her either, and had only begun to think about it very recently.  
>The interior of the tall structure Tilly used for her stargazing was filled with a massive missile, partially disassembled and undergoing integration as dozens of engineers walked about on the multi-level gantry surrounding it. Stopping in front of the tower-sized machine both of them had their eyes/optics pulled upwards towards the top, it was a draw impossible to ignore. "Alright granted, but that still leaves you stuck in your seat for all that time. Do nandroids get claustrophobic?" 'What about boredom?' he wondered inwardly, thinking of the small drawings of the Earth he'd seen taped up in her recharging room.  
>Tilly could only shrug. "Not so far." She answered, and her companion grimly laughed once. She stared up at her ride and thought for a long moment as her optics moved up and down the multi-stage machine. Georges too was stuck in thought, he didn't want to force the nandroid into shutdown for most of the trip but living-space was limited on this vehicle, and despite her words he couldn't imagine a year in a chair failing to drive any thinking being mad. Tilly's slender metal hand pointed upwards at the corner of his vision and he pulled his eyes off the Zeus III-B to focus on her.  
>"There, the third stage, I just drop that after the burn towards Venus, right?" She looked suddenly focused, a smile forming across her faceplate. "So why not keep it instead? When it's empty it's all just extra interior space, and a lot of it too!" The idea was simple, but Georges had to think in several different directions at once before realizing there was no obvious drawback or major impediment to Tilly's idea. "If we turn the capsule around after the burn out there...integrate the docking adapter and...you crazy can-opener I think that'd work!" Georges laughed openly, turning a few heads in the noisy building.

>Training for the flight was almost inconsequential to Tilly, the mission planners had very few critical tests for her to perform which they didn't already have data on from her previous sessions, and a basic checkup from a hastily-certified flight mechanic hadn't turned up any change in her function since she'd returned from Sterling following her first flight. What little training she'd actually needed had mostly been done via simulations, with many 'bad runs' where she'd be presented with a potentially-fatal error and forced to solve her way out of it.  
>Frequently, she failed these, and many simulations ended with her tumbling off into deep space or falling into Venus, but with time she increased her 'win' count faster than her 'lose' tally, so soon the Agency's confidence was high that the first interplanetary mission would be as routine as it was historic. Tilly had tried to learn about her trip's target, but had given up after finding little in the resources available to her. Her flyby, it seemed, would return more data on Venus than was currently known by the humans sending her.  
>The final night before her launch she'd spent like most over the past weeks, at her usual stargazing hideout atop the VAB and despite staying up there late into the pre-dawn couldn't bring herself to enter sleepmode just yet. She was waiting for something, and letting her thoughts drift aimlessly while she laid there. At the mere mention of perhaps seeing the world from above again, Tilly's less-happy experiences over the last year had been overridden by the welcome return of enthusiasm, and she'd been able to compartmentalize those more troubling memories while preparing for this new mission.   
>Now though, hours away, she wondered if she was making a mistake. The Agency had never actually asked her to fly, it was simply the assignment she was given, an order to be followed and no different to her at first than fetching a round of coffee. Now though, after the thrill and terror and exultation of her trips, she found herself motivated well-beyond what her owners were expecting of her, and the idea of that scared her a little. She'd blindly agreed to her first flight, all-but forced the agency's hand for her second, and now? Was she again blindly accepting certain danger, leaping without looking? She didn't think so, but wasn't sure she could trust herself.  
>"I guess I could've said 'no thanks'." She said softly out loud to herself as she stared upwards. "Probably get outmoded for it, but still." She frowned at herself for even suggesting it, in spite of second-guessing herself she knew she'd never turn down a chance to go again no matter the risks. 'What about the risks to others?' she said to herself internally, and involuntarily brought up the sharp image of broken steel and glass lying in the lunar dust. She shivered, but shook her head deliberately, willing the file back into storage. "I can't help what others do." She said steadily to herself at last, and only felt marginally better.  
>Above her a bright unblinking point of light rose finally and caught her attention away from introspection. "There you are!" She said with satisfaction, smiling at the distant planet hanging in the night sky. She raised one hand and extended a segmented metal thumb, holding it over the world up there and taking it away, off and on. From down here, she thought, it hardly seemed Venus was there at all. Before the birds began chirping, she'd started back down the long set of staircases running down the side of the tall building, making it back to her suite in time to replenish the power she'd spent on stargazing all night. 

>A cluster of massive engine bells roared to life, and the staff of the launch complex were treated again to the unlikely sight of a skyscraper-sized tower slowly rising from the pad and arcing into the clouds. For Tilly this was beginning to feel routine, but despite telling herself this she still felt that strange warm glow of overclocking as the world once more slipped away beneath her. Why fight it, she thought to herself, and grinned in the capsule's cabin.  
>The third stage and attached capsule circled the Earth once, then the single large engine flared up again and flung a strange little robot further than anything mankind had ever sent into the void. After the burn, Tilly conferred with mission control until both were satisfied that she was on course, then vented the last of the third stage's hydrogen into open space to clear it. Any corrective burns, and importantly her re-capture burn around Earth at the end of her flight, would be performed by a newly-designed service module fitted beneath the capsule's heat shield.   
>Intended during conception to support humans with the air and water they required for a short week-long flight, the unit now housed an array of sensors and experiment packages, all designed to gather new and exciting data for return to the eager scientists back home. "Venus Libertina, you are go for transposition" the radio chattered at her using her ship's new designation, and she took a deep breath to steady herself. Uncoupling from the third stage had been part of the mission even before her suggestion of using it as living space, but now if she wanted to do anything but sit in place for the coming year she needed to turn her capsule around to re-dock the right way.  
>A small 'pop' rang through the capsule as she jettisoned the now-empty third stage, and she waited nearly a minute before using the reaction control thrusters to slowly turn herself around and face the empty rocket. She'd only killed herself once during the simulations of this maneuver, but the memory of her mistake rang out as an internal prompt she had to shove into the background in order to focus. Slowly the capsule inched forward, closing the distance that had grown after uncoupling until docking probe met port and the two pieces of machinery pulled together with a solid 'clunk'.  
>Tilly was nearly giddy, and wasted no time unbuckling once the docking was complete. Above her head, stowage space had been converted into a round porthole hatch, and once out of her seat she eagerly unfastened it. A breeze briefly rushed passed her as the hatch swung open, the thin mostly-nitrogen air finding a balance between two pressures quickly. The inside was dark, only fuel had occupied the space before and now it was little more than a giant cold tube. 'Still,' she thought to herself as she unfastened her flashlight and looked into the darkness with it. "I can make something with this."

>The first week had been one of organization, taking stock of everything she had available to her and putting everything where she could make the most use of it. What cargo she'd been allotted had mostly been stuffed away into the service module and required several tethered trips outside to transfer it all into her new living space. Her first EVA on her previous flight had been frightening, but now doing it had become a matter of routine, the tether giving her a strong sense of security as she moved around the outer hull. From the outside, she looked over her shoulder at the diminishing Earth now as small as the moon was from the ground. "What a view"   
>Inside her new quarters, she'd gone to work unpacking the materials to convert the spent stage into something livable and began with a series of lights in three rings around the cylindrical space. Once she could see enough to work further, she set up the auxiliary heater supplied to keep the habitat warm enough for her to function. What was the sense in making a habitat if you had to be suited the whole time you were inside it, she'd argued. A pair of light aluminum rods unfolded and fit snugly into place at intervals in the long room, and some light Mylar blankets suspended on them served as dividers between 'rooms'.   
>When the temperature had risen, she'd finally stripped off her protective suit, leaving the insulated covering to float with the helmet beside her. She paused to watch a glove turning in place after giving it a light tap, before stretching her arms out wide above her and straining her servos with a satisfied sigh. She may not have been claustrophobic in the human sense of the word, but room to move around was certainly preferable to her, especially if it was going to be a long trip. Unzipping a vacuum-sealed package, she happily pulled on her familiar blue agency jumpsuit and set about floating throughout her new home inspecting all of her handiwork. Two dividers had turned the long tube into three rooms, the largest at the center with two smaller areas to either side, one leading back into the capsule.  
>This room nearest to the capsule she dubbed 'the master bedroom', where she curled up with her external drive of science fiction curated for her by the collective mission control staff. The room furthest from her she'd called her closet, and for now it only served as a place to stow her spacesuit and cargo, mostly consisting of a few tools for emergency self-maintenance, as well as an atmospheric probe to be released near the flyby. The middle of the spent stage she'd left large and open, and had delighted during those first days simply flying from one curved wall to the next. She'd been denied true weightlessness inside of a ship on her previous flights, but now she felt unrestricted and free as she floated around her habitat.

>By the time the Earth was only a bluish star visible through the porthole of the capsule, Tilly had settled into a comfortable routine, with activity order randomized to keep from repeating any pattern. An external drive contained a library of reading material, and despite being able to transfer an entire book over and process rapidly, she preferred to make each one last by transferring them to her own drives line by line slowly. Music was available though she had little choice over what was played, thanks to a 24/7 transmission on a dedicated channel acting as her own personal radio. For keeping her servos limber, she bounce-ran around the inside of the cylinder at a gentle jog while the radio played static-laden music from the world she'd left behind.  
>When her charge got low, Tilly had to crawl back through the hatch to the capsule's seat in order to replenish her power and enter sleep-mode. She didn't particularly like being pulled away from her habitat for this, even though the capsule had the only view of the outside, and after several weeks began to seriously think about modifying the vehicle around her. She performed a bit of exploratory rocket-surgery using the tools from her maintenance kit, and removed the metal panels that obscured the connection between the charging cable and the battery hidden somewhere deeper in the console. "Aha!" Tilly said out loud when she got the cover off, her computed hunch proving correct.   
>Owing to the complex and frankly rushed design of the vehicle, the flow of power had been routed around multiple components, turning and doubling back on itself in several places to avoid other important machinery. It was painstaking work, but Tilly was determined now that she saw how much longer her charging cable was underneath the bulkheads. Slowly she untangled the complex web of wires, guiding the charge cable backwards along its path freeing it until she had nearly filled the cabin with a coil of cable leading back down to the battery. She only had a bit of tape meant for repairing the dividers, but it was all she needed to route the newly-freed cable down into her habitat adhered to what she considered the floor.  
>The successful renovation filled her with a sense of accomplishment, and that recharge cycle she spent in her master bedroom, floating dreamless with an umbilical stretching all the way to the cabin powering her. "Libertine, copy?" The radio channel flickered at her the following day, and she'd floated through her home back to the cabin to answer the call. "Copy, I'm here sir, good morning!" She called back, checking her internal chronometer and extrapolating for mission control's timezone. "Morning Til, today we've got an inspection of the atmospheric probe for you, if you're not busy" the far-away voice on the intercom was jovial. Back home, the crew were being careful to keep the solo nandroid in regular communication, and in high spirits.  
>"Oh right, he's stowed in the closet but I can head back there and give him a checkup," Tilly said smiling to nobody but herself. "I'll call back when I've finished up, now go eat something sir, I know you haven't yet!" She chided the operator and signed off, pushing off with one foot and floating through the hatchway into her habitat. She took her time floating across the expanse of the middle-room, dubbed after some time as 'the playpen' recalling from her earliest training how rambunctious children could burn off energy in a safe enclosed space. The memory file felt somehow foreign when she'd read it, how long had it been since she'd had to think about caring for children? Floating through the opening in the divider at the far-end of her home Tilly entered the closet, a collection of items stowed by string to the walls.  
>Moving to the largest object stowed there, she opened the lid of a crate and stared down at the disc-shaped simple machine inside. She knew the probe carried no hint of sentience, it was merely a set of timed triggers, but she'd thought of it as a sort of pet and would refer to it as such whenever asked about it. Inspecting the sleeping probe took little time as nothing had changed since the last, and after ensuring the shield was not cracked nor antenna bent she reached down and gave it a pat. "Sorry for PROBING around you like that" She said to it, then laughed loudly at her own awful pun. 

>During the designing process for the service module Tilly had gone with Georges to see the new addition to the familiar capsule she knew. Two engineers were arguing loudly over two different concepts for a complex probe-deployment mechanism, and neither would yield ground to the other each citing weight constraints. Looking between them for a moment, Tilly had looked up at Georges questioningly. "Um, sir? Why don't I just...throw it?" Georges had cackled at the suggestion, then broken the news to the two heated men that their ideas had been superseded by simplicity.  
>placing the lid gently back over the probe's container, she floated for a moment looking at it. None of the scientists who'd sent them both hurtling towards Venus knew very much about the destination, and this humble little probe would descend down into the atmosphere of the mysterious world during the flyby to collect data and relay it back to Tilly to be forwarded home. After another short checkup with mission control, she was free again to use her time as she saw fit, and switched on the channel carrying her music selection. Fly Me to the Moon was already several seconds in when she turned on the sound, the melody echoing through the habitat to her delight. Moving herself quickly back to her open playpen room, she closed her eyes and twirled in place with a smile, thinking back to the night before her launch to the moon.  
>The pleasant memory of the nandroid singer back home set her mood for the rest of the day, and she spent several hours enjoying herself with simple zero-g acrobatics as she listened to song after song broadcast to her from the Earth, for once without a care or worry to distract her from easy joy. That evening, she'd settled into a web of rope she'd tied to one wall for herself in the master bedroom, a short bit of impromptu netting which served as a sort of bed she could hook herself onto with one arm and keep from booting up wherever she'd drifted off to during sleep mode. She curled up and relaxed, plugging herself first into her extended recharging cable, then to the small ribbon cable of her external drive library. It had been over two months since she'd left Earth, and already she had read through dozens of stories, each selected on the whims of the ground crew and staff for being their personal favorites.  
>As the final chapters of one story transferred and were read slowly to her internal storage, she checked her charge and noted with surprise that she was topped-off. "Already?" She spoke aloud with a blink, then conferred with her internal chronometer. She'd been reading for thirteen hours, and hadn't noticed a thing outside of herself for that time. "Oh, huh" She was mildly disconcerted by the missed time, but she'd enjoyed being absorbed in the story and so wasn't unsettled enough to stop from finishing the book and searching through the drive for another to start.  
>Three days of uptime later she finally unplugged from her power cable in order to float back to the other end of her habitat through an opening in the second divider, leading into the closet. Inside one of the several cases she'd tethered there, she'd found another notebook and set of long pencils, with a note from Georges: 'Don't get bored up there, -G'. She'd noticed it when first converting the third stage for living-space, but had stowed it until now. Looking at the art supplies with mild frustration remembering her difficulty with basic drawing, she took them with her anyway back across the open space and up into the capsule. She fixed her optics out the porthole window, lens-apertures finely focusing on the steadily growing world she was heading towards. She frowned, still too far to really resolve much of anything from the point of light. Rolling her optics she resolved to try doodling Venus later when she was closer, then flicked on the radio and turned the volume down on the random music.  
>Floating back into the converted stage to her master bedroom, she got cozy in to her net and reattached her power supply. She froze for a moment. What had she just been doing? She had a momentary panic as the question went without answer. She looked down at her hands and sighed. Doodling, she'd been about to doodle. Letting go of the pad and pencils, she raised a hand to her forehead and pushed back her synthetic hair. Earlier in the day (yesterday?), she'd had a similar lapse of continuity, and it was unsettling her more now that it had happened twice so close together. When had she last powered down? She had to close her optics and try to recall, finding it strangely difficult. She had the unnerving feeling of things not being in their proper place, and she couldn't put her finger on what or why. She paused and flashed open her eyes sharply. What had she just been doing?  
>Her actions looped once more, remembering when she saw the pad float by, and she growled in frustration. "Alright alright, I'll power down!" she shouted at herself, both frustrated at the physical requirement for defrag and reboot in general, and at herself for going multiple days without doing it. Without the same physical exhaustion that forced sleepless humans to rest, Tilly had found it easy to over-extend her uptime so long as she remained on her charger, and jumping from entire book to entire book without stopping had become an entertainment endurance challenge to her. Sleep-mode, she thought inwardly as she closed her optics and timed an automated reboot for eight hours from now, was time she could be spending doing things and not just laying around unaware of herself.   
>She began to awaken once hours later, but was prompted at boot from her internal diagnostics with a message that said 'defragmentation incomplete, power down'. So she did, and set her next boot for another eight hours forward.

>One month from Venus flyby and Tilly had gone on cycles of forgetting to power down, then forcing herself to when she felt her computing speed drop and her memory retrieval lag. One such cycle ended with Tilly booting up from a long defragmentation, opening her optics slowly and running through her boot checks internally. 'Temporary memory clear, battery at full charge, disk space capacity at twenty percent, servos functioning at-' she paused. "That can't be right" She said quietly as she leaned up from her net-hammock and rechecked her permanent storage in more detail. Of her non-standard three drives one was nearly full of high-fidelity video, audio, and the myriad associated connections those memories made. Another drive had been used to compartmentalize every moment of her training both with Sterling and the space agency, filling more than half the space with the rest a smattering of different data sets relating to the various humans who she'd known, their interrelationships with one another and the wider world.  
>Scanning through a file list for the last drive made Tilly feel like a fool, all that storage space and she'd packed eighty percent of it with the stories she'd read off her external drive, committing them to permanent memory as she digested them. Putting her hands to the sides of her head, she tried to think. She didn't want to delete the memory of reading those books, to lose the ability to recall them in perfect detail to herself, but she had to perform triage if she wanted room for real memories by the time of the flyby. She selected a pair of stories she hadn't favored as highly as others, and with a wince she suddenly forgot every detail about them. She frowned at the sense of loss, and began looking for other incidental files to mark for deletion instead of picking another story. Looking inward, she categorized files by last-access date seeking what was least-used, and immediately was greeted by all the familiar rules and regulations that had been drilled into her during her first days of function at Sterling.   
>Since arriving at the agency fresh from her nandroid training, almost all of the rigorously-studied programming on child care and temperament-handling, regulations on what constituted 'properly finished' housework of all kinds, soft-therapy subroutines for consoling an angry master after a hard day's work, table placement protocols for fancy dinners, none had been accessed. Tilly laughed out loud to herself with her optics closed. "Why would it ever matter what side of the plate the fork goes on?" she said, and promptly marked the file for deletion. Nandroids, as the commercials for the robotics giant rightfully claimed, were adaptive machines that could self-program to perform in any number of different settings. Tilly was proof of that, and over the next two days she remained on her power cable and sorted through her memories, streamlining by discarding any useless training that didn't aid her in the performance of her assignment.

>During the long pruning-session of her drives, she scanned by the memory of her struggle with the Russian robot on the moon. For only a millisecond she considered deleting the painful memory, then felt a rush of guilt and nearly made a backup of it instead. She needed to remember that, she thought to herself, someone should. By the time she'd finished curating her files she'd increased her capacity back to fifty percent, still well-over what a nandroid of her young age should have stored but not enough to cause the existential panic of being unable to ever remember new experiences one day due to full or slowly corrupting drives. Giving a long sigh, Tilly let go finally from her netting and began to float towards the opening in the divider, only to feel something yank her backwards. "Ah! Oh right, dumb thing" She muttered as she reached behind her and unplugged her recharge cable.   
>In the closet at the back of the vessel, Tilly peered down at the unthinking probe again in its protective packaging. "We're almost there, 'lil buddy. Just gotta keep going, okay?" She patted the cool surface of the probe, smooth metals making a soft 'clink' on contact. She let her hand rest a moment, and repeated herself internally before replacing the cover and forcing herself to jog several hours in order to clear her mind. It mostly worked, and when an internal prompt showed she was low on power again she returned to her master bedroom to hibernate another recharging cycle.

>During the final two weeks of the approach, Venus had grown visibly through the capsule porthole, and Tilly finally was given a chance to try her hand at doodling again. The distance and blurriness, coupled with her inexperienced hands, made it difficult to represent her approaching destination on paper, but with a little shading she'd managed to crudely represent the terminator line between night and day that she now saw and felt a boost in morale as she inwardly noted her mild improvement. At six days out, Tilly pulled her space suit down from the closet, changed, and maneuvered the box containing her little probe down into the capsule, pulling her recharging cable in with them and sealing the hatch. A few presses at the control panel cycled what thin gasses were present back into the habitat, and when she opened the capsule's main door leading outside it swung open silently.   
>Freeing the probe from its container, Tilly held up the beachball-sized machine and gave it a long look before pressing a light kiss through her helmet on its packed parachute. "Good luck!" She said with a smile, and lightly shoved it through the open door. Watching it drift away gave her a sudden sad pang she hadn't expected to feel, and she had to shut the hatch to keep from watching it float off slowly and growing morose. "It's just a dumb machine" She reassured herself as she equalized pressure between the cabin and habitat. 'Yeah well, so are you' answered back her internal voice of reason, and she snickered at it. Hours after release, the little probe fired an automated short burst of propellant, and dropped its trajectory down to intercept the atmosphere below.

>"Stand by Libertina, we're still showing an anomaly down here." Mission control had become a busy place, busier now than ever with staff on edge leading up to the flyby, and several conflicting trajectory extrapolations had given alarmingly disparate data. As far as Tilly was aware she was on course to pass within a hundred miles of the Venusian atmosphere before flying off into a solar orbit that'd carry her back to the Earth, after months spent coasting. Sitting in her capsule which was rare these days, Tilly stared out the window as the mustard-colored world approached her. This was only the start of the flyby and already she was seeing detail in the clouds she'd never anticipated. Working quickly, she booted up the automated data-gathering array, and as the yellow planet grew close she found herself staring out at it intensely. This was the dull point of light she'd viewed from the roof of the VAB back home?  
>The thought barely seemed to fit, the two images of the bright morning star from Earth and the alien planet before her conflicting internally with one another. After only a few minutes Tilly felt her processor overclocking without her consent again, capturing the rich detail of the moment in high-fidelity. Venus, an entire PLACE, and who knew what lay below the clouds? She sat spellbound as the dumb equipment in the service module gathered data in timed batches while she approached the destination she'd been flying towards for months. Her vessel's instruments were adequate but imperfect, and unlike the more sophisticated equipment at mission control had failed to register the ever-so-slight drift the ship had picked up after she'd jettisoned the probe. Plain ignorance and a rushed schedule had hidden the simple problem posed by throwing the probe from the capsule directly, that she'd exerted a minuscule reactionary force against her craft that had been slowly pushing her off-course for days.

>When the first signs of the off-course drift had been detected, an argument had broken out first in the control room, and then with Tilly herself via radio. Nobody was entirely sure who held the correct figures for her course, and being unable to confirm that something was actually wrong no decision had been reached about correcting it. After all if it was merely computer error then there was nothing to correct, a burn before flyby then might've meant missing valuable data or worse, using up precious fuel she needed for slowing to orbit when she returned home. As the capsule with its docked habitat bore down on the planet, Tilly suppressed and stored her slight worry to be dealt with later, freeing up her CPU to focus only on the sights out her porthole window. It was easy to put fear out of mind, seeing the planet rising beneath her. "I am so sorry I ever called you boring, look at you!" she said to the world with a grin. It was a shame that after all the waiting the flyby would take only hours before she'd be flung back into the long drift home. Tilly could've spent a month orbiting Venus and it still wouldn't have been enough for her to be satisfied now.

>Thick clouds obscured the surface entirely as the planet took up most of her viewport, which had disappointed her at first. "Of all the luck, today it's cloudy?" she'd said at first to herself, then changed her mind after a few minutes of thought. Maybe it was always like that here? She gave a slight shrug and decided to leave the speculation to the scientists, secure in the knowledge that below her cabin were an assortment of machines all clicking and whirring away collecting data that would tell them more than she ever could. She beamed at herself, her reflection a ghost in the glass transposed over the rushing surface of the Venusian atmosphere. She quieted her mind for several minutes, and simply took in the sights. As the blackness of space became only a sliver in the window, her smile wavered slightly. "Ah, that's about close enough isn't it?" she asked herself nervously as she tore her optics off the window and glanced at her console's simple black screen lit with blocky green text. The text shifted rapidly as the capsule's computer struggled to resolve her telemetry.  
>It took Tilly nearly 30 seconds to comprehend her predicament as she stared at the revised periapsis figure and compared it to what was estimated to be the height of Venus' atmosphere. Shaking her head slowly, she looked back out the window, now not with awe but a creeping fear. "No no, that can't be right, that..." she trailed off, running through the available data internally again, hoping she'd missed something, but she hadn't. For a quickly-approaching period of roughly two minutes at her closest distance to Venus, Tilly's vessel was going to skim through the very top of the atmosphere, and aerobrake slightly in the thin wispy air. She nervously opened a channel to mission control and relayed the information hurriedly. At the furthest distance from an orbited object, even the tiniest changes in trajectory can compound to large changes on the other end of the ellipse, especially at the distance Tilly currently was from the Earth. "Alright ah, looks like we're not gonna be able to determine the changes to your course until the flyby is over. Just sit tight, we're working on it." She frowned again.

>'Okay, they're dealing with it' she thought inwardly, and tried to keep shoving her creeping panic to the bottom of her processing cue. For just two minutes, she was closer to Venus than anything self-aware had ever come. Through the roiling clouds below, Tilly thought she could see brief glimpses of a surface, dark lines suggesting craggy mountain ranges, and lighter patches that could've been some sort of desert. In the service bay measurements were made and images captured. Through the porthole, Tilly's optics lit up as a bright orange glow began to streak through the clouds far away in the distance. "There he goes!" she proclaimed triumphantly, momentarily forgetting her own worry. After months of travel together, she was proud to see the little probe performing its job at last. After the glow disappeared, she stayed glued to the window until well after the world below began shrinking away from her. The flyby had ended, and now her course would carry her out around the sun on a long arc towards an intercept with the Earth, at least she hoped. "So uh, I'm still heading home, right?" she asked hopefully, holding down the talk-button on her radio. "Or am I gonna need to hitchhike?"  
>For a sickeningly-long moment, there was no reply, and Tilly grew more apprehensive. "C-cardboard sign? 'Earth or bust?' " she laughed nervously, but caught a glimpse of her own worried expression in the glass of the window. "Sorry about that Libertina, we're still recalculating but we should have a correction burn resolved for you..." the strained voice of the radio operator trailed off, replaced a moment later by Georges cutting in. "'Soon', is how that sentence ends. Hang on Tilly, it might take a little time." She took in a deep breath and exhaled waste-heat as her processor cooled. "Sure thing, I'll uh, play 'count the cows' with myself." She remembered one of the trips she'd taken by car to a magazine interview, a long ride with an agency representative chauffeur who'd taught her the game after a dull half hour of silence. An internal prompt alerted her that she was low on power again, shaking her from the memory. "That was fast" she said to herself, but dutifully left the cabin to seek out the recharging cable. By the tone of Georges' voice she already knew a sleepless night was in store for the man, and she would have time to rest herself before they'd have an answer for her.

>It took over a week for the computers at mission control to finally confirm Tilly's altered course, being checked and rechecked around the clock to make sure nothing had been missed. While she waited, Tilly had clung to her netting bed, pad and pencil in hand. She'd been too preoccupied to focus on another book, and for now the external drive floated away from her dangling on a short tether. On the notepad she'd tried drawing the lunar horizon from memory, and despite her clumsy hands the landscape was becoming recognizable if simple. Her mind wandered as she drew, remembering her journey to the moon with equal fondness and regret. Drawing a dark circle and shading it in, Tilly thought about the crater occupied by the Russian robot, and for a moment wondered what it'd be like to power down for the last time totally alone. She shivered, and crumpled the page leaving the balled paper to float in front of her. With a huff, she batted it away and crossed her arms letting the pad drift away. "Stop that," she said out loud. "You're just making yourself feel worse."

>A burst of static echoed at her from the capsule, and she quickly pulled herself free of the netting and floated through the hatchway. "Hey, I'm here!" she said excitedly, and waited. Two more bursts of static followed before the voice of the operator came through weakly. "Repeating: Venus Libertine, we're transmitting your course-correction now, burn will be at aphelion approximately 100 days from now." As data trickled across space to the capsule computer, the required change in trajectory displayed and dropped Tilly's jaw. "That's practically all my fuel, how am I gonna slow down?". No answer came back though, only several more short bursts of static. Frowning at the console and tapping it lightly, she checked her current fuel against the figure she'd been transmitted, ran some brief math through her processor, then compared the output to her required braking-burn to Earth orbit. The margin of error was tiny, and she wasn't even certain she'd have enough fuel for a full capture, perhaps stranding her in a wildly-elliptical orbit around Earth. "At least they could come up and get me there," she muttered as she parsed the remaining data on her mid-course-correction.

>Waiting with uncertainty was agonizing for the over-stressed nandroid, and after several failed attempts to distract herself with a book she'd finally relented to sleeping off some more of the trip, if only to sidestep the daily worrying. Plugged in and drawing charge, she set an internal autoboot command for three months out, longer than she'd ever spent in sleep-mode. It was better she thought, than spending every waking millisecond trying to distract from her uncertain upcoming maneuver still so far off. Closing her optics, she shut herself down and entered hibernation, and for the next 90 days the habitat was silent except for hum of the heater, and regular bursts of static from the radio.

>*BATTERY CRITICALLY-LOW, SWITCHING TO EXTERNAL DRAW* an internal prompt rang out in the murky cloud of her semi-awareness. Tilly was booting back up, and was met with a wall of internal prompts each timestamped and warning that her power had been decreasing daily. As her senses came online, she could immediately detect something foul in the thin air around her. Trace aerosols of carbon monoxide, fluorine and lithium were inhaled and analyzed, giving her a sickly feeling. She shot her optics open wide and stared down at herself, feeling something wrong within her casing. She hesitantly put a hand to her chest and ran it down slowly, stopping at the middle of her torso and freezing. She felt a bulge pressing against her hand, a small tumorous rise from underneath a distorted exterior panel. "My battery!" she exclaimed, then frantically unzipped and pulled at her sleeves until she wore the top half of the jumpsuit around her waist. Staring down at the smooth panel-lines differentiating the individual plates covering her interior, her optics were drawn to the swollen one over her battery compartment, a faint dark bit of gunk evident just out of sight beneath it.  
>As her mouth hung open, another prompt rang out internally, *ATTEMPT TO CONTACT STERLING SERVICING DEPARTMENT FAILED, OUT OF RANGE*. Her self-maintenance kit, included for unlikely emergencies like this, was tied to the far wall in her closet at the other end of the habitat. Tugging on her now mandatory power-umbilical, she whined quietly and cursed herself for not keeping such things within closer reach. Breathing in deep, she set her nerves and reached down, grabbing the raised rim of the bulged panel centered in her chest. There was barely enough edge there to grip and she lacked fingernails, but was able to slowly force a finger underneath giving her leverage to pry. It took both hands and more force than she thought she had in her, but finally with a groan of tearing steel the panel gave way and flew out of her hands, bouncing around the interior and puncturing one of the thin Mylar room-dividers. What Tilly saw inside herself was grim, the once top-of-the-line battery was swollen and dark, enough gritty corrosion present to obscure the text printed on the power source.  
>Gingerly she fished around the edge of the ruined battery until she found the connective wire there and unplugged it from the rest of her. The unit was held in place by a pair of screwed-on strips of metal, and twice again she had to pry at herself until thin metal sheared apart. When the battery was free, she plucked it from her chest with two fingers, holding it up in front of her optics to inspect it. Even if she'd known the first thing about electronics repair, she doubted this rotted husk would ever have held a charge again. Sighing shakily, she gave the ruined battery a little shove and sent it floating away from her. As she calmed herself from her impromptu self-surgery, she checked her chronometer to make sure she'd woken up when she'd intended, finding herself up a few days earlier than she'd planned. Carefully pulling her power cable along with her as she floated into the cabin, Tilly made for the radio and opened the channel. "Mission control this is Libertina, do you copy?" A long burst of static answered her, then cut out. She waited a full minute and repeated her call, but received no reply. Her last communication with home had been before powering down, letting the crew know she'd be hibernating a while, and no messages had been recorded during her time in sleepmode.  
>Another long minute's wait, another failed attempt to raise mission control. By now Tilly was feeling more than a little frightened, why wasn't anyone responding to her? Steeling herself, she pressed the talk button one more time. "I don't know if you can hear me but," she began, and her voice caught as it synthesized through her speaker. "my battery is fried, I'm on ship's power now. I'm still okay but, well, I'm a little scared." She held the talk button down for several more seconds before adding "I could really use a familiar voice right about now." Nobody granted her wish, and after several more minutes listening to the intermittent bursts of static, she gave up. "Guess I'm on my own up here," she said softly to herself, and stared through the console at nothing for a moment.  
>Even on the moon, she'd never felt quite the sense of solitude and loneliness she was processing now, and was taken aback at just how much she'd underestimated what getting to talk to the men of mission control did for her spirits. Sitting up straight, she lightly slapped the reddish circular lights at her cheeks and gave her window-reflection a stern look. "Fine then, let's get ready for that correction burn"

>A few days later, Tilly's ship reached the most distant point from the sun in its orbit, aphelion. She'd taken the pre-planned burn and ran it again and again through her CPU, trying to judge micro-adjustments improving fuel efficiency and leaving herself something to slow down with. She sat in her cabin, belted in to keep herself from shifting as the ship's speed was altered, and ticked down the final minutes. With a deep breath, she oriented the service module's single engine and pressed the ignition switch. After so long in freefall, the sudden acceleration felt momentarily foreign, And Tilly had to force her optics back open to focus on her instruments. She was glancing back and forth rapidly between two displays, one estimating her closest approach to Earth, the other showing her rapidly-depleting fuel. The burn lasted half a minute, and the estimate of her closest approach home lowered with every second, capturing her attention. Ten thousand miles, five thousand, a thousand. She'd be close, and felt a thrill of excitement. "C'mon, c'mon, almost!" 400 miles closest approach, 300, 200, the capsule gave a shudder and went silent. She froze, and looked at the throttle still wide open. 

>Across the main display, a new message flashed that Tilly could barely begin to process. *SERVICE MODULE FUEL TANK EMPTY* the simple prompt read, five words that spelled her certain doom. "N-no, no t-that can't be it!" She frantically looked back and forth between the displays, as if expecting a miracle to arrive and save her, but none came. Internally she was fighting herself, half of her registering the information and feeding her the outcome, the other half desperate not to believe herself. She was hyperventilating, processor running hot as an internal fan spun up to a ridiculous speed. This wasn't right, she wasn't supposed to run out of fuel, and now she was going all the way home only to pass a few hundred miles above it, then spiral off into space forever. She began shivering, and shook her head rapidly. "This isn't, no! I can't just-, not like that!" she pleaded to the uncaring metal around her, and felt suddenly cold. "Oh god!" Panic rising to a crescendo, an internal prompt warned of encountering a fatal error, and rebooted her. When she came back online a few minutes later, she had to relive the memory of the burn and keep herself from shutting down again. What could she do? What was there to do?  
>Pressing the talk button on the unresponsive radio, she called into the void without answer. "Mission control, if you're out there, I-I finished my burn, I'll pass within 200 miles of you in a few months. Only, I used my remaining fuel, and I'm not gonna be able to slow down, so..." she took her finger off the switch and hugged herself, tucking her chin down into her chest. "So wave goodbye when I fly passed, sirs."

>At two months from Earth intercept, Tilly floated restlessly hooked to her netting bed. She'd spent much of the past few weeks fondly reading over several more books from her external drive, no longer caring about space constraints on disk space. She wouldn't need it much longer anyway, she thought. At first realizing her fate she'd been despondent, and had even briefly entertained the idea of simply unplugging and letting herself power down for good. 'No, that won't do' she'd thought inwardly, wanting to live at least long enough to view her home through the porthole one final time as she flew by. After that, she decided, she'd shut down, not wanting to drift endlessly awake until her hardware gave out. After finishing another book, she unplugged from the external drive for a while and simply rested, contemplating her life up until now. She'd performed well for the agency even before her first flight, and had accepted the missions given to her without hesitation. She'd seen the Earth from above, walked across the surface of the moon, and skimmed the skies of Venus. "Not a bad life, all things considered," she muttered to herself, but it was no consolation. She didn't want to be done, not yet anyway, and felt robbed by fate to have to power down alone for the last time well-before her final decommissioning.

>With a month left, Tilly began to forgo sleepmode again, now no longer caring about the ill-effects the constant uptime had on her simulated psyche. 'If the rest of my life is going to be measured in days, then I want to experience every second I have left' she thought to herself, and wrote a note to tape against the inner hull that read 'Sleepmode when you're deactivated.' As the days dragged on, Tilly stopped reading new material and began pouring over the books she'd saved internally, bookmarked as 'favorites'. For long stretches of time, she simply recounted the stories to herself, and in time began imagining that she was a participant in the tales. In her head she conversed with fictional characters and the memories of real people she knew back home, talking to them about synthetic life and what she'd wished it had been like for her. Music played from file, a soundtrack to her inner dialogue, and when she played Fly Me to the Moon back to herself she was wracked with painful sobbing. She'd never get to hear that song again, she thought, or delight at the beautiful voice of that talented machine she'd seen perform it a lifetime ago. Her processing speed slowed, her ram filled, and her sense of awareness regarding the moment she was in slipped away. She'd never dreamed, but imagined this was what it felt like.

>Without thinking about it one evening, she moved to the capsule and stared out the window sadly. In the distance a bluish star was noticeably brighter than the others, and a feeling of severe homesickness overtook her as she spent hours gazing at it. Finally turning from the sight she retreated back to bed and closed her optics, letting her delirium take her away from the sight of her home growing in the distance. At some point, she stopped keeping track of the days of continual uptime. "Manny, my oldest friend," she mouthed the words from file of her favorite book, speaking as the fictional computer to his fictional companion. "Do you know any good jokes?" She laughed out loud to herself, then her fuzzy thoughts drifted elsewhere. Days passed, and Tilly nested in her little master bedroom, no longer thinking about the approaching Earth, no longer thinking about anything coherent at all. A memory flashed in her focus, and she saw again for an instant shattered glass and steel strewn across grey rock in the darkness of the lunar crater. Another memory flashed, and she was on board an alien ship of unknown origin flung outwards from the sun with Richard Wakefield, Nicole des Jardins and Michael O'toole, exploring the mystery of the unknown craft. She smiled softly to herself in her netting, not seeing her surroundings despite her optics being wide open. A knock came from the door, and she frowned at the interruption irritably.   
>A knock? Suddenly Tilly froze. Had that been real? No of course not, how could it be? But then the sound rang out again, vibrating the hull of her habitat and she felt it. She sat deathly still, CPU struggling to process what she'd heard. A third knock rang out, then a moment later Tilly felt a momentary breeze as some residual atmosphere vented passed ruffling her short hair. Optics wide, she pressed herself tightly into her net, staring with apprehension at the hatchway. She saw movement that she struggled to resolve, and at that moment a dizzying array of warning prompts sounded alarm bells internally grinding her CPU to a halt. She didn't hear the hatch close shut, didn't hear the first words said to her, all she saw was the stainless steel face and gold optics that focused on her from behind a glass helmet in the hatchway. "Ah, so you ARE still online, this is good, da?" Tilly's optics fluttered shut as she involuntarily rebooted.

>Hours passed, for her no time at all. A long defragmentation kept her unconscious, but when it had finally finished optimizing her drive space her boot sequence started up, and soon she opened her optics. Looking around, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, sighed loudly and pinched the bridge of her nose. Was this it? Was she suffering a fatal breakdown of her AI? She'd heard of such things happening, though Sterling claimed it wasn't possible for their products to go insane. At this moment, she doubted the Sterling Guarantee for the first time in her life, and gave a shudder at the prospect of losing herself entirely before the end. An accented voice called to her from the capsule. "Hey, is you online again yet? Thought I heard something in there." Tilly again froze, but fought off the rising panic. "It's not real, it's not real," she began to mutter to herself, but was stopped in her tracks by the face of the Russian robot appearing through the hatch, now unhelmeted. "What was that? Not real?" the soviet pilot floated down in front of Tilly, who shrunk back from her and covered her face with her hands. "Go away, go away please I don't want to see this!" she moaned pitifully, shivering. After a pause, the Russian machine scoffed. "Yeesh, you really are in sorry state aren't you?" She reached forward, and Tilly whimpered. The Russian lightly flicked her shoulder. "Does that not feel real? Huh? Dummy."

>Tilly winced at the feeling in her shoulder, and slowly uncovered her optics, forcing herself to look at the apparent apparition. "I-I-I....w-what? I don't, how?" she spoke incoherently, and the Soviet robot looked annoyed. "We've not got all day, out with it!" she scolded her, and Tilly held her breath. "How are you...how is this real?" she asked in a hushed voice still unconvinced that it was, and the Russian laughed. "Is not long story dummy, will tell but have work to finish first, da? Rickety capsule not refuel self you know." With a terse grin, she turned and disappeared back into the capsule. After several moments of doubt, Tilly let go of her netting and floated after her to poke her head down into the space. "Work? Refuel? I don't, I don't understand what's happening." She tried to make herself sound like anything other than a frightened child, but failed. After a few clicks on the console, the Russian turned to look over her shoulder at her. "What is there not to get? You out of fuel, big-time boned. Frightened American Director calls Master, asks for help. Master say 'da, is good press, Soviet rescue of yankee robot,' get some kind of ah, political concession too I think, these things I not know well." Her cavalier attitude caught Tilly off-guard almost as much as seeing her face had. "Rescue? You're, rescuing me?" she asked with wide optics, still trying to convince herself she hadn't suffered a cascade-collapse of her AI driving her mad. Hesitantly, she added "You?"  
>The Soviet machine stopped what she was doing and turned again, fixing Tilly with a harsh stare. "Da, I am not believing it either." she said flatly, and went back to her work. Beneath them, the sound of sloshing liquid reverberated up through the cab. Tilly touched the bulkhead and felt the vibration. It all felt real, and nothing she was experiencing told her it wasn't. "Why would....I mean after..." The Russian cut her off mid-sentence. "Master says 'fly', I fly. Besides," she gave Tilly a half-shrug without looking. "Hard to blame, did try to kill you." Tilly's shoulders slumped and she turned her optics downwards. "I-I wish I hadn't-" she began meekly, but was rebuffed. "Then you'd have got scrapped up there instead of me, only nobody come get you probably, eh?" She leaned back in the seat to look up at her, reaching out and tapping Tilly's forehead lightly with an outstretched finger. "Quit dwelling on what WAS and start thinking about what IS, dummy." Both of them remained quiet for several minutes, the silence becoming uncomfortable to each of them. Finally Tilly spoke up, meeting her counterpart's optics again. "What's your name?" For the first time since boarding the American's vessel, the Soviet pilot smiled genuinely. "I am Tatyana, and I know good and well who YOU are, Tilly." The two carefully studied one another for a moment before Tatyana broke the stare to check the transfer of fuel between the vessels. 

>"So, here is plan: after fuel transfer finished, we approach the Earth and slow down like you were supposed to," Tatyana said after a few moments of silence. "Before that, I detach and perform own slowdown burn, had to match your trajectory in order to rendezvous all the way out here." Tilly blinked at her and looked out the window at the blue-green marble in the distance. "How close are we? My chronometer is giving me garbage data, I think I might've broken it." Tatyana turned to stare at her dumbfounded. "Mother of, what you been doing to yourself in this thing?" Tilly could only laugh, surprising them both, and the sound carried through the habitat with an echo. "You think that's bad, ask me why I have to stay plugged in!" Tatyana processed the seemingly-mad laughter for a moment before her jaw dropped. "Not your battery!" Tilly could only giggle and nod, a flood of feelings overtaking her. She was relieved, more than that she was exuberant to actually speak with someone again. Tatyana could only look on at the half-mad machine in wonder, realizing now just how much the tiny American robot had been through. She shook her head as Tilly quieted down, the shaking nandroid holding her abdomen. "Ah, I think I needed that." Tilly gave her a warm smile, grateful just for her presence. Tatyana looked away suddenly uncomfortable, but nodded. A faint buzz sounded from the console and caught her attention. "Ah! All done, enough fuel and then some!" Looking back at Tilly the cosmobot beamed proudly. 

>Tilly could only hold her hands at her chest, covering the void where her battery had been. "Tatyana I, thank you, I don't know what to say." She backed up into her master bedroom as Tatyana rose from the seat and followed her. "Nyet, was not my idea," she dismissed her, then smiled. "Am still glad I came though." If Tilly had possessed tear ducts, they'd have spilled over at the words. The pair floated in silence a moment longer before Tatyana stirred, something clearly on her mind. "Before I go, been wondering something since fist you appear on television." She looked up at the nandroid and fixed all of her attention on her. "Why did you fly?" Tilly blinked in surprise, and didn't hesitate to answer. "Because, it's amazing!" she said simply with a shrug, and the soviet slumped. "That's it?" Tilly shook her head. "I mean it's so much more than that, but you know already, you fly too! Don't you sorta....'get it'? " It was Tatyana's turn to be surprised. "Nyet! Is most frightening thing I've ever done! I only fly because Master commands it, I wouldn't keep wishing for it like some, some... maniac!" She gestured at Tilly with both hands and leaned forward. "How many times you almost bite the big one, huh? And you still LIKE this?" She threw her head back and laughed richly. "You really are crazy thing!" A grin crept across Tilly's faceplate, and the pair laughed easily together. "Maybe I'll take a break after this one" she said after a moment, looking to the floor. Tatyana scoffed. "Pff, unlikely." Both of them nodded.

>Looking back up at her fellow machine, a dangerous question crossed Tilly's mind next, but she had to know. "Tatyana, when we were on the moon..." A hand shot up from the Soviet. "Ah this again? leave it." Tilly shook her head stubbornly. "I just never understood why, why you attacked me." Her turn to look down reluctantly, Tatyana's voice lowered. "Was, in bad place. Crater bad too but, up here I mean" she tapped a metal finger against her head. "Before shutdown I think, 'am going to die, wouldn't be here if not for her', boot back up and what do I see?" She gave a heavy sigh. "Was not...not in right place, da?" Tilly nodded slowly, the aching wound of her painful memory already gaining some closure. "I'm sorry too." Tatyana nodded thoughtfully for a moment, then looked up with a little smirk. "At least you learn not to wake up strange machines on moon, eh?" They laughed together again at that, more easily than the first time.

>For another hour the two chatted about a number of things. Tatyana's family interested Tilly the most, and she hung on every minor detail of the domestic service life she'd been built for but never had. They'd spoken of their masters, and Tilly had realized with a profound start that she didn't exactly know who to call 'master', being simply government property. After all, nobody at the agency 'owned' the rockets did they? Eventually though, the meeting had to be cut short as they raced towards their home, and Tatyana had replaced her helmet and gone to the capsule to exit. "Don't make me come up here again now, okay? Get burn right this time!" She sounded dismissive, but Tilly could see the happy smile on her steel riveted faceplate. After she had left, Tilly watching on as the oddly spherical vessel drifted away from her own, she breathed in deeply and signed.   
>She couldn't recall when she'd last felt this good. Ten minutes after belting herself into the capsule and closing the hatch to the habitat, she jettisoned her home of the past year and reoriented to get a look at it through the glass. She watched the former third stage tank slowly spinning off for a few minutes longer, thinking about how much had happened inside it, then oriented her capsule for the braking burn. Earth below her, the service module engine roared to life once more under her control and after less than a minute, she was safely recaptured in orbit around her homeworld. Checking and rechecking the figures of her orbit as if they might suddenly change, Tilly giggled, then sobbed heavily despite her indelibly-wide smile. She'd made it.

EPILOGUE  
>A field-maintenance team had been on the ground as she parachuted down after reentry, and had wasted no time in securing her a temporary power supply before the capsule's batteries drained entirely. Georges had been there with them, and as soon as she was free of the capsule she'd begun standing to hug him, only to stumble under the now-foreign gravity. Some extensive servicing was required by a Sterling technician to bring her back to full efficiency. New marginally larger drives replaced her old upgrades after a file-dump, and failing ram had been replaced with this year's slightly improved product. Chronometer, battery, three stiffened digit servos, and half a dozen other parts needed outright replacing. It took nearly two weeks of repair, but finally she was flown home to the mission control center, her launch complex.  
>During her debriefing with the agency Director, she'd learned that they'd been attempting to communicate nonstop after her receiving antenna failed, and despite being unable to reply they'd heard every lonely unanswered transmission she'd made. The rescue hadn't been possible for them, no vehicle was prepared or could be ready in time for her return, so in a desperate hail-Mary the Director had called his rival agency using the private channel from Tatyana's moon-mission itinerary, which had very quickly gotten the Soviet's attention. The details of the cooperation weren't interesting to Tilly, something about the sharing of Venus data among all nations, but the Director spent little time explaining. "All that matters," he'd finished, "is that this rescue mission has paved the way for future cooperation in space."  
>"And that I made it back" Tilly said to herself when she'd left the director's office. "Hey!" From down the hall, Georges' voice rang out, and he jogged to her side. "Got something in the mail for you!" Blinking, Tilly looked at the heavily-stamped envelope, not used to receiving anything herself. She'd gotten a flood of fan-mail after her first flight of course, but an agency intern had been tasked with sorting though and mailing form-replies. The sun was already at the horizon when she started climbing the familiar long staircases leading up the side of the VAB, unopened envelope in hand. By the time she'd made it to the roof, the stars had begun poking out, and she sat to read her mail by the dim glow of the roof-lights.

>"Dear dummy, Heard you are home safe, glad I did not fly again for nothing! Here is home address, let me know when you fly next, yes? Best wishes, Tatyana."

>Smirking at her Russian counterpart's cheek, she held the letter close as she stared once more upwards. "I will."


	5. Tatyana's Second Flight

>Yuri had little time for wonder and amazement as he rolled along the lunar landscape in a flimsy little buggy he'd had to assemble from kit after landing.   
>Life support was limited, this being the first official test of the speedily-developed system off of the Earth, and his mission had been meticulously pre-planned without much margin, but included a final order he'd been handed just before the capsule's door was shut by the pad technicians.  
>Upon collecting his final core sample from a site two kilometers away from the lander, the Cosmonaut reached into his suit's breast pocked and took out the still-sealed envelope he'd gotten nearly four days ago.  
>Special orders, from the Commandant himself no less, to only be opened after primary objectives were completed. The old man himself had handed Yuri the envelope, unnerving him with that perpetually-sharp look in his eyes. The secrecy of the order made him very nervous. Tearing away at the seal finally, he opened the blank red envelope and pulled a slip of paper from it.  
>'Proceed to new target-of-interest specified, collect and return. Cargo is not to be referenced on open channels.' The short letter had included a set of coordinates not far from where he was now, further than he'd driven so far but still within the theoretical range of the little balloon-tire cart. Cargo, he had no idea what to think of that wording, and even speculation drew a blank.  
>Turning the moon-buggy, Yuri drove for fifteen minutes, then slowed as he reached the rim of a shadowed crater, checking his simple instruments to be sure he was where he was supposed to be. This was it? Stopping, he climbed out and fumbled for his light as he walked towards the rim in lunar slow-motion.  
>"My God!" He shouted into his helmet as the beam clicked on and illuminated a crumpled figure on the floor of the crater, nearly stumbling at the sight. Was that the 'cargo'? The secrecy of these orders made sense to him now as he hammered a piton into the rim and tied off a line to descend, whatever this was had to be classified. "Above my pay-grade," Yuri muttered as he backed over the edge and rappelled into the crater.  
>As he got closer his unease turned to curiosity, the figure's metal features coming into sharp view. He tried not to speculate wildly while he hoisted the machine by the shoulders and began dragging it back up the slope towards the rim, but thought of the American robot's boast on television only weeks prior and had to wonder. Had they tried to match the American robot who came here first and failed?   
>Retrieving the unresponsive machine proved difficult even in the lowered gravity, he'd had to winch her up with the rover before settling her on the back faced-down. Before leaving the crater rim, he'd spotted the glint of something metallic not far off, and breaking protocol for a few minutes had driven after it. "Stranger and stranger." he said to himself grimly as he stowed the odd camera and faded US flag he'd found lying on the open landscape.  
>The cabin of the LK lander was tiny, and after stowing his rock samples and himself, Yuri had been forced to rest the heavy automaton on his lap in order to close the hatch. "Alright sweetheart," he said to his passenger as he throttled up the engine. "Time to go home."

>Two months later, Tatyana rebooted. As her senses slowly came online, she cautiously opened curious gold optics and blinked. A fight, a hammer, a rock, a terrified robot. Images from her last shutdown flooded her awareness. "Ugh," she made a disgusted noise, wincing at the memory of her CPU-rattling blow to the head. Reaching up she touched her face but found only smooth riveted steel. Where was she?   
>As she sat up and looked around at a dingy repair bay that reminded her greatly of her factory-of-origin, the steel door to the room opened and two men entered with eyes locked on her. Had they been watching her through one-way glass? One of the men she did not recognize, some lab technician by the looks of his coat. The second portly figure she did though, and seeing him caused her to perk up and hop from the table. "Master!"  
>Before she could stop herself she'd thrown her arms around the old man's neck and embraced him with a laugh. The Commandant gave the lab tech a strained look and awkwardly patted the machines' back. Why did they have to be so life-like, he thought.  
>Catching herself, Tatyana pulled away and put her hands behind her back, rectangular lights at her cheeks flaring up red for a moment. "S-sorry sir, I just...didn't think I'd ever see you again!" More at ease, the Commandant smiled at her. "Likewise Tatyana, I am glad to have you back." As they left the building together and walked towards the man's waiting car, he told her of the many strings he'd pulled to get her home.  
>"The Party was already pushing hard for a manned mission, luckily for me. First I had to convince the Commissar that we had pre-selected targets of scientific interest, that they happened to be within driving distance of your crash site was not a detail I shared. Motivating the ground crew to make a manned mission possible took creativity, but everyone knew what another failure would mean now and, well we got it done."   
>As the car started up, the radio flickered to life midway through a news report. "-condition after successfully landing on the moon, Comrade Gagarin is expected to make a swift recovery after receiving treatment for radiation poi-" quickly the Commandant shut it off as his driver took them both away.  
>With company present, he remained quiet about any more details of her miraculous recovery until they'd reached the train station and departed by rail. Tatyana was grateful even in silence, to just be sitting next to her beloved owner again, and stole glances at him the whole ride as if he were going to vanish when next she looked.  
>Cold reality still worked into her processing though, and her joy at returning to Earth was tempered by a more serious question. "Why risk all that, sir? Why not just, leave me?" The Commandant smiled and chuckled softly. "Partly selfish, partly national security. I didn't want any near-future American missions running across you up there, the fallout of that would be...bah, too much. Besides," he fixed her with a sad look. "You should have heard the awful wail the boys made when I told them we'd get another robot."  
>He shivered and closed his eyes. "'Tatyana, Tatyana!' they said, 'give us Tatyana back!' Even Anya treated me coldly after that, you know how she can be when she's upset with me." As hours passed she told him about her nearly-successful landing, of her despair at the broken antenna and final hours spent trying to cobble together some way to let him know she'd made it. She did not mention her struggle with the American nandroid, and he didn't ask about the damage she'd incurred. "Sir, do they know what I was doing? Do they know where I've been all this time?"  
>"No, nor should they, as far as the Party is concerned your flight never officially happened, and the Americans haven't called the bluff. You've been offline following an accident at the Cosmodrome, and if anyone digs too deeply I can arrange the necessary paperwork for a more-thorough cover story." Tatyana frowned as the pair disembarked from the train.  
>She wasn't worried about losing credit as the first machine on the moon, far from it as the thought didn't even cross her CPU. What saddened her was having to lie to her boys, and not getting to regale them with even a sanitized version her adventure. "Yes, I understand Master." 

>Reunion was sweeter than Tatyana could've ever hoped it to be, the twin boys nearly tackling her out the door both laughing and crying. The Commandant's wife even teared up, and had to excuse herself to re-compose before she could greet her children's nanny. Lifting the twins as she stood on legs powered by fresh new hydraulics, she took stock of the familiar home with a happy sigh.  
>Laundry strewn about and piled everywhere, dishes with old food sitting wherever they'd been left untouched for who knew how long, the fireplace was spilling ash onto the carpet unlit and she could see the dust hanging mid-air in every sunbeam. She smiled as she carried the affectionate children around hearing their many questions while she inspected, but only answered what she could and wincing whenever forced to tell untruths. She was home.  
>For the next month, life returned to normal in the household, and just as in her first days Tatyana pushed herself to put the home back into order, each finished job giving her satisfaction that felt somehow richer now that she'd been faced with losing her happy life here. Little moments made her smile now where before they'd gone unnoticed, and she found herself laughing more often with the boys as they played.  
>A familiar scene played out, and for a moment Tatyana felt an odd sudden file-recall not unlike deja-vu. The boys had been put to bed, the stairs had been descended, and the old couple sat once more on their couch watching their black and white screen. "Tatyana dear, that robot is on TV again, look!" the plump woman said with a fascinated expression.   
>She looked as instructed, and watched as grainy footage of an American rocket launch played. A small still image of the pilot was displayed in the corner with the words "First Venus Voyager" beneath. She found herself staring at the smiling robot, the nandroid looking upwards with an expression that looked hopeful.   
>She closed her optics a moment and saw the face again. Now it was behind a glass helmet, short orange hair a mess and optics wide with terror. She held a rock in one hand, and looked as if she was going to reboot out of sheer panic. Tatyana opened her optics and looked back to the stock photo, so very different than her stored memory. "Yes, so she is Ma'am."  
>Alone later that evening in her recharging closet, Tatyana sat against the wall with her knees pulled to her chest, not yet ready for sleepmode. She was running the memory, what uncorrupted bits she could access, of waking up cold on the moon. "Why? Why would she try booting me up?" she said to herself softly, leaning her head back. Hadn't the nandroid known they were enemies? She frowned. Her Master seemed to speak of his rivals as enemies, naturally she had picked up on it, but now she questioned herself over it. She'd been still mid-boot when she spotted the smiling robot's faceplate, and replaying the file she noted that the astrobot had appeared relieved, happy even. She winced, tightening and loosening her hand.   
>She hadn't even thought when she swung her hammer, every bit of desperate hopeless anger from her shutdown flooding her senses again at boot-up, and after that? She shook her head, remembering only tumbling with the other machine cursing unintelligibly and striking at her, the memory incoherent. "She was frightened," she said out loud to herself, closing her optics and remembering the look of horror on the American's faceplate after she'd struck the decisive blow. She rubbed her head, and grimaced sheepishly.  
>"Stupid, I didn't even wait," She chastised herself, not for failing to deactivate the nandroid but for having swung at her in the first place. What might've been if she hadn't? The speculation ran in many different directions before she closed off the computation. "Bah, doesn't matter much now, does it? I'm home, and she's flying out there again."   
>Breathing in deeply, she plugged herself in and began to power down. "Don't dwell on what was, look to what IS," she said as she closed her optics for the night, repeating something her Master was fond of saying when hindsight made him feel the fool.

>It had been just over a year since her doomed landing on the moon, but for Tatyana it might've been another lifetime ago. Her home had flourished again under her dutiful hands, her masters in good spirit, and the boys shooting up like weeds already standing waist-high to the slender robot. Through the occasional news report or bit of idle talk from her master, she'd been half-following her rival's latest journey with curiosity as best as she was able.  
>They'd flung her out to Venus, the first such space probe to leave the Earth/Moon system, and she had reportedly flown very close to the alien world. Television reports came less often after the flyby, the exciting part already out of the way in the public's perception, and Tatyana had found herself wondering what the little robot was doing at various random moments throughout her days.  
>Two small paper lunch bags adorned with cute doodles of the moon, one full and the other crescent, were filled and folded before distribution to the twins. After sending them off and joining her Mistress in the living room, Tatyana nearly jumped when she heard her Master shout from his study. "DAMMIT ALEKSEI, SAY NOTHING UNTIL I ARRIVE!" The sound of a phone being violently slammed down followed several seconds later by heavy rushed footsteps.  
>"Dear?" Anya his dutiful wife stood with concern. "Work, my love. I must go." He was brief as he pulled on his coat and boots preparing to leave on the spot. Stopping at the doorway, he turned and looked over his shoulder. "Tatyana, come." She froze for only a millisecond, then quickly followed. "You have need of me again, sir?" She asked hesitantly, and Anya looked between them both nervously. The old man sighed. "I don't know yet. Maybe."  
>Unlike her first long train ride to Baikonur, this one was filled with conversation between master and machine. Something had gone wrong on the American's mission she'd learned, and evidently they were getting very desperate. Inside the private train car the Commandant still lowered his voice to a near whisper. "Tatyana, they tell me the American agency Director called himself, begged for help in salvaging the mission."  
>She tilted her head at him. "Oh? Why should you? Isn't it better to let them fail and lose face?" she spoke the words, but found at once that she didn't enjoy the idea of her rival dying out there alone nearly as much as she might've been expected to. Leaning forward, the old man looked at her with serious predatory eyes. "Because they called us on YOUR private channel."  
>Optics widened, and suddenly she understood. For her trip to the moon she'd been given a private radio band to transmit home on, a secure signal which had been marked for use on her mission itinerary. The itinerary itself, as well as a sketch she'd been particularly proud of, had been missing on her recovery. She had presumed the items were looted from her by the nandroid, but hadn't thought about it beyond it being a minor irritant until now.  
>"So, it is...blackmail, then?" She said carefully, making sure she was understanding correctly. The Commandant nodded thoughtfully. "The message even being sent that way implicitly says 'we found your robot, we know'. If they suffer a mission failure now, the implied threat is that they'll tell the world of yours. If they go down in failure, then they're not going to let us off." He scoffed and folded his arms. "Always willing to negotiate when they hold the trump card, Americans."  
>By the time they'd reached the Cosmodrome, the two of them had already agreed to Tatyana taking the pilot's seat once more. The decision made sense to each of them for their own reasons, and some rousing and intimidating words from Tatyana's master were enough to muster the ground crew to the task. The mission was to be one of 'good will', which was to say they'd be lording it over their rivals eternally in exchange for the unorthodox cooperation.  
>A finished N2 rocket was available, as was another Vostok capsule, and fitting of the vehicles was rapid as the American's ship grew closer to the day of the flyby of Earth. English had been tricky for her at first, but progressed quickly as the first part of her crash-course (she winced at the term) training for the rescue. Connecting the two vessels together via a fuel line could be done externally, but she'd need to enter the American's ship to conduct the transfer and unless the nandroid was deactivated she'd need to be able to communicate with her.   
>She was hesitant at first to enter the simulator to practice rendezvous, but found it far easier than her first runs attempting to land virtually in her moon-landing training. By week's end, she'd succeeded 20 sims without failure consecutively, and was flight-certified once again. This time, her photo was taken both in her dark red jumpsuit and in the same form-hugging insulated orange spacesuit she'd worn on the moon. 

>Tatyana's optics stayed tightly closed through the launch, the vibration from the rocket feeling as if it would loosen all her rivets and shake her to pieces. She kept her calm as best she could, and tried to shut out her senses to spare her overworked processor. Two orbits later, she followed instructions and initiated a carefully pre-planned burn, shooting her off into a wild ellipse around the Earth.  
>This far-reaching orbit went nearly as far out as the moon was, and at the furthest point from home she'd be within 50km of the crippled American ship as it careened down into Earth's gravity well. She had hours to occupy herself both before and after the burn and slow drift out towards her target, and between rough pencil sketches in the margins of her itinerary she found herself thinking mostly about the pilot she'd been sent to rescue. It was odd, she thought, that they'd meet again under such circumstances. But what would she find when she got there? Was the pilot even operating the ship still?   
>As the two vessels closed distance, she reoriented hers and waited for the closest approach to match velocities. A worry ran through her as she waiting for the burn, and she wondered for a moment if perhaps her rival would strike out at her when on sight, just as Tatyana herself had done on the moon. "Not likely, not much fight in her," she muttered to herself, then touched the side of her head gently. 'Sure about that?' she asked inwardly, but didn't answer herself.   
>Picking up speed with a long engine burn, Tatyana's Vostok capsule matched Tilly's vessel as it raced towards Earth. When she was sure the relative speed between them was minimal, Tatyana began closing the distance with several short bursts from the reaction thrusters and within minutes she'd spotted the glint of metal through her view port. Seeing the ship growing in the distance brought home the reality of the situation to her, she was going to board the vessel of the robot she'd tried to kill, and attempt to save her.  
>She shook her head and laughed weakly. "Ridiculous, all ridiculous," she muttered as she slowed next to the American ship. Ridiculous or not, she'd been the only machine pilot with any training ready under such short notice, and no human pilot would be risked on this mission. With mechanical precision the two ships matched speeds and sat motionless relative to one another at just ten meters apart. Tatyana breathed in deep and let out a shaky sigh to cool herself internally, this part was going to be the most difficult, and she'd had no experience with EVA before now. Unbuckling herself, she swung the hatch open and pulled herself to the opening.   
>Working quickly she first unwound her personal tether from under her seat and clipped herself to the lifeline, then freed the sturdier ship-to-ship tether that had been tightly wound and stored just outside the doorway. "Now or never," she breathed to herself, and with a gentle push let go of her ship, floating in open space with only a fabric ribbon to keep her from spinning away from her capsule forever. Tatyana floated slowly across the gap towards the other ship, and reached out for a handhold. Her fingers slipped once and she nearly missed, but grabbed again at some exterior pipe and took hold.  
>"Got you!" She said triumphantly to herself as she attached the ships together securely. She pulled herself back down the tether and retrieved the refueling hose from her vessel's service module quickly. She wanted this part over as fast as possible, but stopped herself from rushing by thinking of all the ways this could still go disastrously. Fueling hose in hand she again moved down the tether to the other ship, and searched around for the place where the spent stage was fueled before launch.   
>Locating the fueling port wasn't hard, she'd already studied the schematics provided by the American agency, and within a minute the clamp was locked in place. Tatyana maneuvered herself towards the capsule using her hands to pull herself along, then peered in through the glass of the porthole. She could see light, but no pilot. With reluctance she raised her gloved fist to the door and knocked. "Going to be a bit of a shock, hopefully not too much" she said to herself as she waited a moment. Nothing happened, and so she knocked again.   
>Was the nandroid in sleepmode? Maybe she was already offline for good? The thought of finding her counterpart deactivated beyond recovery made her wince, and she quickly knocked once more before tugging at the hatch. A short gust escaped as the hatch swung open nearly knocking her grip free, but she held on and maneuvered herself inside the cabin. No ambush came, and Tatyana worked quickly to close the hatch behind her. Another open hatchway led into the third stage habitat, where she could see lights and what looked like a tinfoil wall, but still no movement from within.  
>She steeled herself, still expecting anything from a fight to a deactivated corpse, and moved herself forward through the hatch. There against the curved wall, balled up and cowering along an array of netting, was Tilly. The sight wasn't anything like what she'd been expecting, the nandroid's optics were wild and wide, apertures narrowed to pinpricks as she stared up at Tatyana. 'She looks so frightened,' she thought to herself, feeling a rush of sudden pity. Had she looked the same during her hopeless last moments shutting down on the moon? Seeing her fellow machine operational, even in such a state, made her smile involuntarily.  
"Ah, so you ARE still online, this is good, da?"


	6. Tilly's Fourth Flight

>The Agency's launch complex had never been as full of activity and life as it was now, certainly a far cry from the hardly hundred men Tilly had been originally assigned to fetch coffee for in her first days after being donated by Sterling Robotics. Another fiscal year had rolled over since the plucky nandroid had been shot off towards Venus, and in that time her parent manufacturer had again used their carefully-tailored tax loophole to their financial benefit. This time however the robotics giant hadn't simply taken a run-of-the-mill product out of their stock to donate, instead opting to put the time and effort into improving on their baseline model to make a custom variant designed for use by the Agency. All of the upgrades Tilly had received during her servicing were included stock, as well as several new improvements even she lacked. The new custom nandroid's CPU clocked noticeably higher, she could juggle more mental tasks than Tilly thanks to expanded RAM, and her base-frame was made of stronger titanium alloy rather than the lightweight aluminum mix of the standard model. Not wasting time feeding the new machine useless training in child-rearing, this nandroid had instead been given a crash course in the basics of modern physics, astronomy, aviation training and an intro to orbital mechanics. By the end of her class-of-one schooling the fresh nandroid had been confident and ready for her new life, deactivated then shipped by crate to the Agency just as Tilly had before her.

>Kimmy first rebooted surrounded by curious Agency crew with the Director in his office, and had bowed extravagantly as her programming instructed her to. Tilly had not been present, but she'd heard the story secondhand from Georges while she delivered him coffee one morning. "You should see her, brand new model with all kinds of nifty customization just for the Agency! I tell you Til, she's gonna be a perfect fit!" Tilly frowned as the pair walked together around the VAB, Georges on an important coffee-and-smoke break she'd decided to accompany him on. "She's going to be flying from now on then, I take it?" Tilly asked, keeping her eyes on the sparse grass around the building. Georges took a puff then shrugged. "She's the best autopilot we have now, no offense. Hey, don't be like that." He nudged her shoulder lightly when the nandroid stared off away from them. "You were the prototype, you set the stage! You deserve a good retirement, it's what I said you'd get after your first flight isn't it?" Tilly could only nod slowly. "It is but, I just thought I'd get at least one more go of it after Venus, you know?" She looked up and blinked hopeful blue optics at him. Georges could only give her a shrug, feeling just the slightest bit of empathy for the strange bit of mobile hardware he'd come to know. Already he could see the glass cabinet display in some not-too-distant future, a case at the Smithsonian perhaps housing the motionless little robot who'd let the Agency keep up in the early days of the space race. He put on a smile for the nandroid.  
"Eh, you never know, right?"

>It was nearly two months before the two Agency-owned nandroids met faceplate-to-faceplate. For the intervening time, Kimmy had underwent the same harsh conditioning training Tilly had done in her early days, establishing baseline readings for her records and surpassing several of her predecessor's benchmarks. Walking lazily outside towards her next delivery one day, Tilly had spotted the newer nandroid strolling across the tarmac of the runway at a brisk pace. Rushing to catch up, she'd flagged her replacement down with a wave. "Hey! I've been meaning to say hi! I'm-" Tilly was cut off by Kimmy giving a false snort and looking her up and down. "Tilly, yeah I know," she started, her dismissive tone immediately putting Tilly on edge. "Aren't you retired? I didn't know they kept you around to fetch coffee still. That's something though, right? Toodles!" With a flip of her barely shoulder-length red hair she kept walking, leaving Tilly processing the brief exchange wondering if she'd read something wrong.

>Over the following month, Kimmy continued to train aggressively, and Tilly continued to run her usual errands for the staff. After their short encounter, Tilly had grown slowly more irritated over the way her replacement had flippantly blown her off, but she tried not to dwell on it as she fell back into her pre-flight life at the Agency. One afternoon while going between buildings she'd been stopped by the sound of a distant rocket being fired. She looked up just in time to see the new lunar lander test rig rising through the air untethered, hover for a moment, then descend back beneath the line of trees in the distance. Tilly's optics narrowed, remembering her touch-and-go landing on the older rig a year ago. "Not bad for a first try," she muttered to herself, and continued on to her destination.

>Another afternoon, another fresh round of coffee. Tilly sighed as she neared the meeting room holding her tray of caffeine. Weren't there interns for this now? Opening the door she was met with the sight of a dozen men engrossed in conversation. "-new era for us now, we're in regular contact with the Soviet's agency and they're actually cooperating! Who'd have ever thought?" Georges was saying with a wide grin when she'd entered. "We've confirmed they've got their new robot up to standard, then?" The Director cut in, not giving Tilly a second glance as he took the offered drink. "They sent us her stats yesterday, not as good as Kimmy but definitely close." Collins, new head of astrobot training, was very confident in his new mechanical pilot's abilities, and had even argued against collaboration with the rival agency during the early planning stages. Nodding at him, the director spoke again. "Once the base-camp lander is down, we're going to need to be ready to launch when they do." Georges looked confident as he took his coffee from Tilly. "Two Z-3s are already built, a third is close and Congress has approved funding for an additional six launch vehicles!" He looked like a child viewing his still-wrapped Christmas presents, and laughed. "We'll be more than ready."

>When Tilly left the meeting and returned her empty tray to the break room, she looked around for anyone else who might have need of a nandroid in that moment. Finding herself alone, she made a relieved retreat back to her recharging 'suite' and closed the door behind her with a heavy sigh. From a small drawer below her mirror she pulled out Tatyana's most recent letter, her stylistic handwriting etched onto curious beige paper.  
"Tilly: Heard more about replacement pilot today, name is 'Irina'. Sounds pretty, hope she likes flying more than I. Master says I might meet her before her launch, will tell you what she is like if I do. You meet new US pilot yet? Bet she has lot to learn. Boys need bed now, write later. -Tatyana"  
>Tilly smiled at the Russian robot's update, then pulled her pad and pencil close to respond. "Tatyana: Yes, our new pilot's name is Kimmy, apparently quite good but kind of rude if you ask me. Hope your Irina can handle her when they're stuck in a capsule or Kimmy might have to float home!" She paused for a moment and read her own lines back to herself, before adding "Kind of wish it was you and me going, you know?" She capped the letter there to prevent herself from spilling out her fears onto the page, that she'd been outmoded in all but name, that she was growing more certain by the day that she'd never fly again, and her creeping worry when forced to think about what she was going to do without that part of her life now. Leaving the sealed envelope on the short desk, Tilly rested on her cot and plugged herself in to the recharging cable, vigilant to set both an internal alarm for boot and an additional reminder prompt to immediately unplug when fully charged.

>A crowd had gathered around the far perimeter of the launch complex, and even inside of it the engineers and mission planners had huddled together outside to watch a rocket lift off. Shorter by a serious degree than the average men of the Agency, Tilly had to squeeze herself around and through the group to get a good view, and by the time she'd found her place the large digital countdown timer had reached the one minute mark. She watched the numbers tick down, hearing the call-outs from the loudspeaker until it reached zero and the huge machine rumbled to life. Tilly was fascinated by the sight now having witnessed launch from two perspectives, and stared with an impossible-to-suppress grin as she watched the rocket arc beyond the clouds. Shielding her optics from the sun as they followed the missile upwards, Tilly thought about the packed-away little habitat on board heading for the moon. 'A place for humans to stay for longer than a few hours' Georges had called it, and the idea of a structure going up there had given her CPU a stir. As the rocket disappeared into the distance, Tilly's excitement ebbed back and she frowned. That would be the last she'd see of that moon-base in person, she thought to herself.

>From the sidelines Tilly had watched as signal to the unmanned habitat had been lost, then recovered again after it had touched down. She'd been impressed until Georges had excitedly begun telling her that it had all been a series of pre-timed burns based on data from her own landing adjusted for mass. "No AI? Not even a little? That AIn't no way to fly." She'd scoffed and her dumb pun was missed by Georges. Simple mechanisms were no match for a machine like herself made to think and act, and she was more than a little insulted that simple timed triggers had been made to work the landing instead of herself. Two weeks later, another launch was being prepared, this time to put Kimmy into orbit for her rendezvous with the new Russian pilot. The mission was simple, and hardly anything she hadn't done before, but Tilly still felt a growing jealously towards this new nandroid. Kimmy and Irina were to meet in orbit and dock their crafts together, then perform the lunar insertion burn as one. The Russians were providing a two-pilot lander flown by their pilot, while the American agency provided the capsule and service module operated by theirs. Unlike Tatyana and Tilly's flights, this mission would first put them into lunar orbit, leaving the command module there as they descended in the lander towards the empty lunar basecamp. With the lunar night scheduled to fall over the habitat just over a week later, they'd have to work quickly preparing the base for human's arrival, then depart for home before the two week night began.

>A knock came at Kimmy's door the night before her first launch, and Tilly had cracked the door to poke her head in. "Hey! I just wanted to drop by to wish you good luck!" She tried to sound friendly, since their first encounter they'd not spoken again, and Tilly had processed for a long time how to fix that. "Oh, I don't need any coffee thanks." Kimmy said dismissively when she saw the older nandroid. "See, it's funny because we don't drink." Tilly blinked at her, not finding it funny at all. "Well, if you have any questions about your flight tomorrow, I could-" she began, but was cut off by a curt laugh from Kimmy. "Sure I have some questions, like how do you mess up not one but TWO parachutes? Or, how do you go all the way to the moon but NOT take any pictures? Or an even better one, how do you foul up so bad at Venus that it takes another whole space agency to bail you out of trouble?" Kimmy began casually, but had grown more intense as she stood and put her hands on her hips. Tilly recoiled. "I don't know what you've heard, but there's a lot more to those stories than-" again she was cut off by the pushier nandroid. "Doesn't matter, the Agency has a real pilot now so feel free to hang around fetching reports." "Enough! What is your malfunction?!" Tilly yelled at her finally, raised voice not coming easily to her. With a start she noticed that her hands were balled into tight fists. Something about just hearing the modulated tone of the new pilot made one want to silence her. "MY malfunction? None, I'm brand new and perfect. I've got faster processing, I'm more durable, very user-friendly and..." Kimmy ran a hand down the curves of her torso. "I'm even made to look better on camera than you. But as for your malfunctions? Do you want a printout sweetheart?" Tilly turned, finding it difficult to even keep the harsh nandroid in her view. "I just came by to try and be nice, and you're glitched if you think you're anything close to 'user-friendly'." She shot back, measuring her tone and trying to keep her elevated mood in check. "No Tilly," Kimmy said as she sat back down. "You came by because you wanted to be involved somehow." Turning her back on the older nandroid, she added "You're not."

>Another Zeus-3 rocket, the workhorse of the Agency, lifted off the pad the following morning after the sun had risen enough to chase off the morning dew. This launch Tilly watched from her stargazing spot atop the VAB, and for one horrifying millisecond while recalling the argument with the other pilot, wished that it would explode. She shook the thought off as quickly as it had appeared, and forcefully wished Kimmy good luck to counter the dark impulse. For a long time after the rocket disappeared into the sky she stayed up there, having simply no other tasks that needed her attention. She thought about the two robots who would pave the way for a joint human crew in the near future, and despite the bit of pride she felt at her early role in that still felt she was missing out. Retirement, what did that even mean? As far as she could tell, it was serving coffee and generally milling around with little to do. "How long am I supposed to do that for?" She thought to herself, grimacing. It hadn't been more than a couple of months since her return from the long voyage beyond Venus, and already the time spent on the ground was beginning to feel more dull than the months she'd spent in that tin can. Was this it until her final outmoding and decommissioning? The thought of it scared her far more than her close calls, and she remained up there until the evening to view the stars rather than go back down to ferry another report.

>Four days after launch, Tilly once again brought a fresh round of coffee to the men of mission control without care for the menial task. "How are they doing?" She asked curiously when she gave Georges his drink. A couple nearby heads turned and gave her angry looks, and Georges kept his voice down. "We haven't heard anything since the landing, it's been hours." He paused to take a sip and gave her a serious look. "At least we're pretty sure they landed, hard to tell. Something's definitely wrong up there." Tilly looked back at the large displays worriedly. "Maybe it's just their antenna?" She asked hopefully, but he shook his head. "They'd be at the habitat by now and could just use that one to reach us or the Russian control room, neither of us are getting anything from them though." At this Tilly's CPU stirred, processing an array of speculation as to what might've gone wrong. "How are you going to find out what happened up there?" She asked as several thoughts converged at once internally. Georges just sighed and looked back at the displays. "Only way is to go look."

>The next day the media had ran rampant with speculation about the failure of the joint US/USSR mission, leaving many in mission control as frustrated as the public who had just digested the story of a Soviet robot saving Tilly a few months prior. After twelve hours of no contact from the two robots on the moon, communication between the rival space agencies had abruptly stopped as well, and nobody tried to reestablish the link. Tilly had been tracked down and summoned early the following day, and followed a young intern to the same meeting room where she'd been assigned her first flight. A small group of men including Georges and the Agency Director were waiting for her, and as soon as she'd taken the offered seat the greyed man in charge spoke quickly. "We need to find out what happened up there and no spysat would give us any usable information. We have a vehicle already on the pad being fueled, all it needs is an autopilot and you're our only backup for the moment" Tilly stared at him with uncertainty. Could they really launch again so soon after Kimmy's flight? 'Forget it, they know what they're doing, just say YES SIR already!' she said to herself internally, and gave the Director an energetic smile. "Yes Sir!"

>It took another twenty-four hours before the spare rocket was ready to fly, and in that time Tilly practiced on the new landing simulator the Agency had built for Kimmy and other future pilots. Though she performed well she found the simulation lacking compared to the real thing. "You can't even feel anything in there, on a real landing you've got inertia and all your internal readouts helping orient you." She complained as she exited the simulator cabin. "Just a formality for you anyway, right?" Georges answered her, ready to escort her off to her last-minute tour of the mockup habitat she'd be landing near. In the hanger the large squat cylinder sat with an open hatchway, and inside Tilly had gotten to see the large interior space empty without gear or experiments. "It's wider than my flyby habitat!" She'd exclaimed, impressed by the scale. Georges fixed her with a serious look as she admired the mockup. "Tilly, just remember the time constraints on this mission, okay? You won't really have any time for sightseeing on this one." She nodded, but inwardly acknowledged that she was still going to take a moment to look at the real base when she was there, even if just for a second.

>Launch of the freshly-fueled rocket proceeded nominally, and Tilly felt a fresh perspective now having watched one from the outside. It was more than a year since she'd lifted off towards her flyby with Venus, and she'd been convinced over the last several weeks that it would be her last. Despite the routine nature of the flight's beginning she still relished every second of it, and overclocked on purpose to take it all in again. One orbit later the third stage lit up and flung Tilly out towards the moon once more before dropping clear of her lander. During the three day coast Tilly listened to the soft background music played from mission control, and read a book back to herself from internal memory. During servicing post-Venus her quickly diminishing hard disk space had posed a problem for Sterling repairmen as they couldn't simply keep adding more drives, and it had been bumped up the chain until an overworked debugger several states away had devised the novel solution. For memories like Tilly's favorite books the files could now be kept in a more compressed state, not instantly readable but there for recollection when she called it up and unpacked it. The fix had greatly reduced the space taken up by many of her larger files, and the space saving innovation was even being worked into the next nandroid models as a stock feature. As she grew closer to the moon, she found herself wondering about what could have happened to Kimmy and Irina down there. "Crashed maybe, suit heaters might've failed, could be they weren't radiation shielded enough or-" She stopped herself and shook her head. Too much could've gone wrong, could still go wrong, for her to worry about it now. She had her job: Land close to the 2-pilot lander, investigate and take photos if there was a crash site, and get out of there before nightfall froze the suit and her in it. As the final descent burn finished and she began falling towards the landing site, Tilly thought she saw a glimpse of something out the porthole window for a moment. It looked like a star slowly moving against the backdrop of the others, but then it winked out. She didn't have time to process the possibilities, and turned her attention back to the controls.

>Less than one mile above the surface, Tilly's lander floated along sideways towards the site that was only visible by instrument. As she watched the figures change in regular familiar pattern the procession was suddenly broken, dials spinning wildly for several seconds. "What the heck?" She said out loud as she looked outside for some explanation and found none. As the strange interruption ended the computer and mechanical dials both struggled to find their footing and provide Tilly with usable data. She knew she was close to the base, at least within a few miles but beyond that couldn't be sure. Shaking her head she reluctantly throttled up the lander after waiting a tense thirty more seconds, eager to set down and hoping she wouldn't have too far of a walk. Nervous, she watched her fuel closely as it ran low leaving her the barest amount needed for the return, if that. Kicking dust and small gravel up into long arcs, Tilly's lander touched down on the surface. As she sat in the cabin for several moments the landing computer finally stopped shifting values and settled on her position. The figure made her groan. "Eighteen miles?!" She was so far off that she had to laugh at herself there alone in the cabin for just a minute. Helmet attached, Tilly stuffed a lightweight nylon satchel with both spare batteries to recharge her and her suit heater, a flashlight, a newer smaller camera courtesy of the Agency, and a collapsing rock hammer. Stepping through the hatchway and closing it behind herself she hopped without pause to the surface below. A quick check of her internal chronometer told her she had a little over six hours before the slow sweep of the terminator line would cross her position and she'd be cast into temperatures far too low for her little heater to contend with. Comparing the saved file of the computer screen reading her position to the landscape around her she picked her direction with computed dead-reckoning, then bounded off at her most efficient slow-motion clip. Some highly variable internal computation told her this walk would take around five hours if she kept a good pace, and she'd be able to hot-swap batteries midway through the journey to keep the heater running. "Plenty of time to get into the hab before dark," she said to herself as she moved across the surface, the only motion on the sterile world.

>Less than an hour later Tilly was shaken from her determined trek across the surface by something appearing on the horizon, and moving fast. She stopped to watch it as it approached, and as it grew close she could see the dim light of the engine lighting up. "A lander!" The detail was just barely discernible at her distance when it came down, appearing to waver once on landing but setting gently. Before it was down Tilly was already off bouncing after it, her mission momentarily on pause. It took a further twenty minutes to reach the lander as she crossed what she judged to be roughly a mile. By the time she grew close the pilot had already left the capsule and was sitting on the ground working on something. The figure looked up, as Tilly approached, and both of them recognized each other's facesplates through their helmets with a grinned. Standing up Tatyana quickly embraced her nandroid comrade, and they pressed their helmets together to hear one another. "Tilly! I had suspicion you might come, but where from? Did not see your lander!" Tilly shook her head inside the helmet. "Overshot the base, something went haywire with my instruments when I came down." Tatyana nodded knowingly then released her and held up four digits before pointing at the radio controls each of them had at one wrist. Tilly turned hers on and switched to the fourth band, then heard Tatyana's voice clearly. "You too? I thought was my mistake overshooting but something really is screwy about that spot." Tilly agreed, then looked past her at the ground where the cosmobot had been seated. "What are you doing with that?" On the ground lay one of the two solar panels of the Soviet lander, plucked like an insect's wing. Tatyana knelt back down and began putting the finishing touches on her work, tying a set of wires down with a zip-tie. "I have two spare batteries for self and suit, but even together would not be quite enough to make basecamp. I figure I try to catch a little sun while I walk, da? Should help a little." Basecamp. Tilly looked up and scanned the horizon, locating her mental markers quickly. "The lunar night is coming, we've got to move." The Russian stood and nodded as she pulled two bits of nylon rope attached to the solar panel up around her shoulders. "Da da, am ready now if you are." One of the panes of blue glass came away from the rest of the strut, and she tied the piece in place atop her backpack looping the rope around her helmet's neck ring. "Let's go for a stroll!"

>The walk was long, but the pair filled the time with plenty of conversation now that they weren't constrained to short postcards, a necessary distraction from the approaching night present in both their minds. They both confirmed each other's suspicion that they'd been sent with the same task at nearly the same time, their parent agencies both now mistrusting the other to investigate fairly. "And naturally, no other pilots were ready on short notice again? You'd think they'd start training whole classes of us." Tilly said with a laugh, then stopped realizing that her joke was likely to be reality one day. "They already started trying, but first official pilots disappear and now they use old test pilots to go find them. Kind of funny, da?" For a while longer they filled the time with idle chatter, Tilly mostly listening as Tatyana rattled off numerous little stories of her household. She didn't find her day-to-day domestic life stories to be that interesting, but she knew Tilly hung on them intently and so told anyway to fill their long walk. At one point though she stopped, glancing over her shoulder idly and nearly stumbling. "Look!" Tilly turned and her optics widened. Where they'd come from hours before was obscured by a mountain's now-long shadow, and no light reflected off Tatyana's lander for them to see it by. "Okay go, let's go!" Tilly said stubbornly after a split-second of awe and dread.

>Another hour passed as they jogged along, stopping only long enough to swap batteries again. Shadows were growing long around them, and both could sense the imminent darkness. "I see it!" Tatyana shouted as they ran, and both made a break for it as the habitat glinted in the dying sunlight. Another ten minutes and the habitat had grown close enough to make out detail. "Hey, over there!" Tilly pointed off to her right at another man-made shape. "It's the Zorya lander, the replacements DID make it!" She began to turn towards the lander but Tatyana grabbed her harshly by the arm and pulled her back on-course. "Nyet! No time!" Only a hundred feet lay between the two machines and the front door of the habitat when darkness fell. All at once the landscape was bathed in black with only the stars visible above to give some definition to the darkness. Both of them tripped and went down, and within seconds they were already receiving internal warnings in their own programming languages of the rapid temperature drop. Tatyana could feel her legs stiffening up, joints responding poorly as her metals contracted in the cold. Tilly had a rapid recall of her race back to her lander on her first trip to the moon, following her and Tatyana's fist encounter. "C-c-come-on!" Tilly shook as she tried to force unwilling servos to respond, grabbing her fellow machine under one shoulder and lifting her on legs that were already failing to work as ordered. Holding onto one another the two robots limped their way the last few feet to the hatch and frantically pulled at the release. For several terrifying seconds it seemed as if the hatch would not budge, but Tatyana took the release lever from Tilly and dropped her weight on it with a groan, forcing it. Quickly Tilly pushed her inside and followed, slamming the hatch shut behind them. She tried fumbling with her flashlight, but her fingers weren't responding. Tatyana tapped her suit's sewn-in light and aimed it at Tilly who huddled by a control panel. Within a few seconds she'd found the button to cycle the tiny airlock, and when she pressed her numb hand against the switch warm oxygen-rich air pumped into the chamber. The longer they sat the warmer they felt, and for several minutes neither of them said anything as the airlock heater brought their temperature back up. When they were able to move comfortably again, Tatyana rose from her seated position and banged against the inner-hatch looking at Tilly. "Nobody come answer yet, you'd think they hear airlock cycling if anyone home." The nandroid nodded and put her hand against the metal. "Doesn't sound like anything's moving in there. I didn't see any lights on when we were getting close either." The cosmobot thought about this for a moment, then reached past her and pulled the release on the inner hatch.

>The door swung open into darkness, and Tatyana's beam of light swept across everything sitting just as it had been at stowed at launch. "Doesn't look like anyone's been in here yet," Tilly said, moving through the hatch into the open space and turning on her own flashlight. "Da, so where are replacement pilots?" Moving around the room, Tatyana found the main switchboard quickly and flipped on the lights. Another switch turned on the life support in the rest of the habitat, filling it with warm thin air that humans could breath. Tilly removed her helmet and began to scout around. The interior of the space was a small rounded room with table and stools set at the center. Along the curved wall surrounding it were set four doorways in addition to the airlock they'd come through, and an inspection of each revealed them to be a bunkroom, greenhouse, laboratory and cargo hold. Another section of interior space was closed off to them with no access point, but Tilly could feel the hum of machinery behind the bulkhead and surmised it was where the essential systems of the habitat were located. Everything was sealed up, packed away neatly and still awaiting the original machine crew to set the place up. In storage Tilly dug out a pair of sealed bags containing jumpsuits intended for their replacements. She didn't waste time and changed out of her suit right there in storage, pulling on the familiar blue uniform with a happy sigh. When she returned to the central room she found Tatyana without helmet and typing away at the control panel set against one wall. "Found us something that isn't thermally insulated to wear," she announced as she stopped behind the cosmobot. "Da, thank you. I'm just working on calling home for us, system is a little unfamiliar but I think I have it." She paused and looked back at Tilly with a frown. "Ah, who do we call first, mine or yours?" Tilly matched her expression and ran the possibilities through her processor. "Either way slights one of them in their eyes, so no winning move there," she began, segmented digits stroking her faceplate's chin in imitation of Georges. Optics lighting up, she smiled. "So let's tell both at the same time! Tatyana, can we put out a broadcast that they'll both pick up on simultaneously? Not direct it at either of them?" Tatyana thought for a moment, then slowly nodded. "Anyone down there who wanted to listen in could hear that, but da, is doable." She processed hard for several seconds before coming to her conclusion. "I think is good idea. Let's do it."

>A joint message was broadcast from the moon at the Earth, and the two space-fairing robots were careful but honest in what they said, knowing that multiple governments and untold scores of amateur radio enthusiasts were listening in. They'd overshot and had to walk, return was impossible until lunar day in two weeks, no sign of the new pilots so far. On Earth the steadily growing political tensions froze in place as both parties heard their pilots give updates together. On the moon Tilly and Tatyana busied themselves fulfilling their replacement's duties preparing the small base for future human missions. Much of the work was tedious, and in the lab neither of the droids had understood much of the checklist that they were fulfilling. One experiment captured both of their attention by the fourth day though, a small heated aquarium had been filled and used to hatch a collection of fairy shrimp who now swam with ease around the little box. "Such tiny things they are," Tatyana had remarked as the pair marveled at the small swimming shapes. "Second lifeforms on the moon," Tilly added in wonder. Preparing the greenhouse was even more engrossing for both as the basic principal of their work was easier for them to process without a vast library of background knowledge outside their fields. Some sort of lightweight synthetic medium, Tatyana said it reminded her of cat litter, formed a bed for the vacuum-sealed seeds they carefully planted under UV lights throughout two long beds. After several days, both of the robots had laughed and cheered as the first tiny green shoots poked their heads above the man-made soil. One item on the checklist they had to leave undone for now was filling a large box in the lab. It was meant to attempt extracting oxygen from the lunar regolith, but neither of them wanted to risk freezing outside to go get a few scoops of moon-dirt. After a week living in their new habitat Tatyana and Tilly had finished furnishing the structure and felt at home. With nothing left to do but check in with Earth now and then, the pair finally settled in and began to relax.

>Sitting at the round table in the central room, Tatyana and Tilly laid playing cards down face-up simultaneously from their halves of the deck, and the holder of the higher-value card took both. They'd found the deck while rifling through the supplies stowed in the cargo hold, but neither knew any serious card-games and Tatyana only knew War from playing it with her boys. The cosmobot grinned as she won a round and stacked the cards at the bottom of her deck. "So Tilly," she began with a mischievous expression molded across her steel face. "In factory training, classmates and I had question for one another. You know, 'breaking ice' kind of thing, everybody laugh, know one another better." Laying down a card and feeling confident at winning two back, Tilly shrugged. "Alright you've got me curious, what's the question?" Laying down her next card, Tatyana glanced at the table. "If you could pick any human, usually American actor, but any human you could...'you know', who you pick?" Tilly blinked and forgot to lay down her card for a moment. "What do you mean 'you know', I DON'T know." Tatyana glanced back up and cocked her eyebrow, fixing Tilly with a knowing look until the nandroid's circular cheeks lit up red. "OH! Oh come on, I've never thought about that!" The Russian chuckled. "So repressed! No YOU come on, every robot like us thinks about it at least once, be silly and deny it if you want I don't care, just thought it be funny conversation is all. Your move." Tilly blinked again at her, the glow at her cheeks not dying down. Silently they played several more rounds, and Tatyana took Tilly's cards every time. "Chuck Connors." She finally spoke up at last like a child admitting they'd broken a vase. Tatyana snickered and forgot her cards for a moment. "Who?" Tilly looked up sharply defensive. "I just like the way he works a rifle, t-that's all!" Tatyana threw her head back and laughed heartily, and the laughter infected Tilly until both of them were giggling away with one another in their little habitat. Finally their laughter subsided, and Tilly was able to get in her rebuttable. "Alright alright, so you've heard mine but what about yours? What meatbag has Tatyana's optic?" Now it was the cosmobot's turn to look slightly uncomfortable, rectangular lights at her cheeks flashing a bright red. "Well that's obvious isn't it? It has to be king cowboy himself, John Wayne." Now Tilly snickered, but covered her faceplate with her free hand. "Really? HIM? I mean that Genghis Khan movie he did was pretty....eh" she raised her hand and made a 'so-so' motion. Tatyana stiffened up and closed her golden optics for a moment. "I will kindly ask you to now keep the Duke's name out of your filthy mouth. Your move." She spoke politely enough that it made Tilly burst out in another giggle before she resumed the game.

-A few days later, the lunar daylight was approaching to banish their two week night, arriving in another 48 hours and freeing them of the habitat. A red light bathed the interior room as a siren rang out, and both robots assembled to puzzle out what was going on, Tatyana rushing to the console with Tilly nervously looking on over her shoulder. "Am no scientist so cannot interpret all figures, but I know what THIS is," Tatyana said nervously pointing at one of the small digital readouts. "Is magnetometer display, and right now it going pretty crazy. Lots of radiation outside, but think we protected well in here. Base made for fragile humans after all, da?" Tilly nodded slowly, remembering a random ramble by Georges on one of his escorted smoke breaks. "It's a solar flare, gotta be for it to be reading that high now," she said peering closely at the figures. "I can't believe we're here to see this!" Tatyana looked back over her shoulder at her nandroid friend and grimaced. "Even with shielding on drives and CPU that kind of radiation fry us like we being microwaved, we go outside that is. How you impressed by this? Space trying to kill us right now." Tilly stepped back and tried to compose her thoughts unsuccessfully. "It's just...." She thought about the nature of the star her planet circled, how the same collection of reacting material both gave life to the organics who'd created her and yet posed an ever-present risk to them and their machines outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere. "..it's just amazing," was all she could offer with a helpless shrug. For the next day and a half the duo patiently waited out the solar storm, nervously playing cards and conversing. "What you think we find when we get to joint lander?" Tatyana asked, laying down a 10. Tilly sighed and laid down a 5 not expecting to beat the high card. "Don't know, maybe they tried to shelter in there and powered down?" She laid down a 2 after the Russian gathered their cards. "But why? Base not far off, you'd think they try for it. I mean, we made it and look how far we have to walk." Tatyana laid down another ten. "Well, what if they both fell and broke their helmets? That could account for them both failing to check in, right?" Tilly laid out a 4, not convinced by her own hypothesis. Tatyana gathered the cards and played again. "Both falling and freezing up like that? Not likely odds dummy." Tilly frowned, but knew her counterpart was right. "So then, what? Something happened to them after they landed, they never made it here, but why?" She laid down a 10 and looked across at the Soviet. Tatyana looked at the card for a moment and shrugged. "Hard to say, won't know until tomorrow when we go out, da?"  
Tatyana laid down a 2, and Tilly nodded in silent agreement as she took the cards.

>The following day, both robots booted out of sleep mode in their bunks with light pouring in through the porthole in the quarters' wall. Day had dawned finally after two weeks of lunar night. The pair worked quickly to dress in the cargo hold where their suits had been left, pulling on the tight insulated garments as if they were racing one another. When the airlock light turned green signaling the small room had been vented of oxygen, Tatyana opened the hatch and the two machines stepped back out onto the surface. "Nights too long up here, not a fan." Tatyana offered as the pair moved away from the habitat. The joint-lander was just over a mile away by their reckoning, though a slight rise in the landscape obscured the vehicle from view. Setting off at a brisk pace, Tilly and Tatyana remained quiet during the fifteen minute walk up the hillside to look down on the lander. Both of them froze in place for a full minute as they surveyed the scene. The lander was pristine, though a long series of drag-marks in the ground leading to the legs told of a spotty landing. Around the small craft were a series of boot-prints, and several spots where the dust had been disturbed by motion. Without a word both of the robots made their way down the slight hill with the same curiosity. Tatyana went at once to the lander, inspecting it to see if there was some less obvious damage to the machine. Tilly followed the tracks in the dust with her optics, leading up another slight rise a few yards away. Following the boot-prints nervously, she crested the hill and looked down with grim acknowledgment. At the bottom of the short slope were two figures laying prostrate on the lunar surface. "Tatyana! I found them."

>"Irina is froze up and without power but doesn't look too damaged, broken helmet biggest concern." Tatyana said as she examined the motionless cosmobot. "Gonna give her some juice and try to force boot," she added while Tilly knelt beside the still form of Kimmy. Unlike the Russian robot, Kimmy had a jagged gash torn in her suit's torso. A sharp blow had struck clear through her outer plating and pierced her battery, black ejecta from it staining the rest of the suit and the rock-hammer that lay a few feet away from them. Tilly frowned and looked the still replacement pilot over. "Kim's battery is broken open, but she should still be able to run off the suit's power to boot." Looking back over her shoulder, Tilly saw Tatyana shake her head in frustration, then heard her curse in Russian. "No good, can't even boot safemode. CPU is scrap. Damn!" Her head lowered for several second before she sighed sadly. "She's gone. What about yours?" Tilly looked back down at Kimmy, then desperately plugged her spare battery into the newer nandroid's suit. For a moment Tilly had hope, but Kimmy's optics only briefly glowed and stared blankly forward without recognition, and putting a hand to the robot's chest she could feel the replacement pilot's drive clicking away in a dead state. "No good, she's..." Tilly felt a sense of loss she hadn't expected. "She's gone too."

>The dead machines were left where they lay as Tilly and Tatyana made their way back to the joint lander together slowly. "What do you think happened between them to make them do that to each other?" Tilly asked after a while. Tatyana shrugged. "Who knows, hard to say now. Would knowing make much difference?" Tilly only looked down. "Maybe." Looking at her for a long moment, Tatyana sighed. "Let's get off this dumb rock, da? I'm driving." Tilly glanced up at her sharply and gave her a quizzical look. "What do you mean?" Smirking, the cosmobot checked over the exterior of the Zorya lander. "We have thirty kilometer walk back to your lander which might not even have enough fuel left for takeoff you say, And my lander which is only rated for one, even that touchy power-wise since I pull solar panel off. Solution obvious, da?" Gesturing at the joint lander, she smiled. Tilly slowly returned the expression, then nodded enthusiastically.

>Within the hour, the "Zorya" lander was granted permission by radio to lift off, and the single engine bell had flared up at Tatyana's control. Minutes later they'd achieved orbit, and over the next several hours grew closer to and eventually reached the vessel that had been left in orbit by their ill-fated replacements. Docking went easily, and less than an hour later the lander was left floating free around the moon as the capsule and two passengers rocketed back towards the Earth. After their departure burn, both robots had found themselves quiet after their grim discovery on the moon. "What are you going to- hey!" Tatyana stopped mid sentence to watch a small bulb flicker out on the control panel. "This light, is only on when we talking, see?" Tilly watched the bulb flicker out again as the cosmobot went quiet. "Is it...recording?" She asked slowly, watching the Russian tinker with the control panel. "Da, writes whenever audio is picking up I figure, give me moment." A few moments later, the red bulb refused to light no matter how much they spoke, their words recorded only onto their own drives. "Hey, if that was recording during the flight out, there's got to be an archive right?" Tilly asked, suddenly feeling closer to finding out just what had befallen Kimmy and Irina. "Da, archive not only here, it has recording from lander too. Radio uplink, if I had to guess." After several seconds Tatyana began skipping forward through archive from the beginning, and both she and Tilly sat in their shared capsule with rapt attention as they sped towards home.

>File 0013: "Welcome aboard, took your time with the docking huh! Why don't you take a seat while I handle flying us?" "Don't you think we should compare itineraries first? It is on checklist of things to do before burn." "Forget the formalities, I can do this whole thing in sleep-mode myself. Watch, you'll see." "These are NOT my orders..." "Just pipe down enjoy the ride okay?"

>File 0052: "Separation good, we are clear of command module." "Don't you think I can see that? I have optics too you know." "Is standard protocol to call out events, how you not know this?" "Quiet, I have work to do. Why don't you clean the glass or something and be useful?"

>File 0060: "500 meters! Damn, some kind of anomaly! We are getting bad altimeter data from the computer, targeting data is nonsense too!" "Just tell me in feet! Can't you compensate? Fly by optics if you have to, what's the matter with you?!"

>File 0075: "We're off by more than a MILE you Soviet scrap!" "Sensor readings went haywire, you saw it! Don't you lay this on ME you pompous junk-heap!" *audible gasp* "How DARE you! Fine, you just stay here while I go take the first step and do EVERYTHING!" "You malfunctioning glitch, We already talked about this! I piloted us down, I'm going out first!"

>File 0079: "Off!" "Stop shoving!" "Get off me!" "You want to be first?! FINE!" "AHH!" "You idiot, my helmet! Look what you've done!" "Feh! Not my fault it's made inferior, just like y- OW! Did you really just throw a rock at me?!" "You scrap!" "ENOUGH OF YOU!" "STOP, DON'T!" "позвольте мне отдохнуть сейчас,"

>Tilly and Tatyana sat for several minutes in stunned silence after listening to the recordings of the two pilots. "I can't believe it, I mean I know we saw them but, to think they bickered until...until they just killed each other like that," Tilly finally said quietly, suddenly glad for company to experience the unsettling moment with. Tatyana shook her head. "Nyet, solar flare killed them, fried drives and CPUs. They fought and shut down though, da." Tilly gave a shudder, remembering their first meeting in the crater. "Must have been awful." Both of them sat listlessly for several minutes alone in their thoughts, when suddenly the radio cut in. "Command module Soma, we have you on good approach home. Do you have any report on your mission? Missions?" Both Tatyana and Tilly looked at one another, and neither reached for the switch to transmit right away. "What do you think will happen when they learn there's been a serious fight up here?" Tilly asked cautiously. Tatyana frowned and looked thoughtful. "I not know of politics well but, if Master is any indication of general opinion? Maybe war over moon, war for war's sake." They both looked at one another worriedly as another request for communication came over the radio. Both studied one another, and without a word Tilly pressed the 'talk' switch finally. "Update, yes! Well, both pilots were deactivated, real bad accident it looks like. Can't be sure but looks like Kimmy caught a micro-meteorite to the battery compartment and the shrapnel broke Irina's helmet, must've been standing close when it happened. If they were recoverable before they're not now, the solar flare a few days ago wiped them, they're a total loss. However, we still managed to complete their mission! The base is ready for human occupancy!" Tatyana stared at her with wide optics as she closed the channel. "You lied!" She exclaimed, as if she couldn't even conceive of the idea. "And to your owners no less?" Tilly gave a shrug, It wasn't her first time. "Is that better or worse than them blowing each other up over some stupid robots?" Tatyana stared at her a long moment, then threw her head back and laughed. "I was right before, you really ARE crazy thing!" Reaching forward she deleted the recorded messages, leaving the two of them with a secret between them.

EPILOGUE

>"Micrometeor impact?" The Agency Director asked incredulously as Tilly sat across his desk from him once more. After splashdown, she and Tatyana had made a promise to keep the ugly truth of what had happened between them. Recovery teams were quick to respond, and in short order they'd been separated with Tatyana receiving a short flight to the Russian embassy awaiting her trip home. "That's just my best guess, sir. Kimmy had a broken-open battery and Irina's helmet was smashed by something hard." The Director eyed her suspiciously for a moment. Below his desk was a heavily postmarked box adorned with foreign cyrilic stamps. Inside had been a small note expressing good-will between national space agencies, and below that the bulky camera and folded flag from Tilly's first moon landing. "And if it was...something else?" the greying man said finally, steepling his hands on his desk and stared at her knowingly. Tilly tried not to wince, and shrugged instead to cover it. "I imagine there'd be some kind of international incident, right sir?" The Director lifted his eyebrows. "Same reason we don't talk about who the first robot on the moon really was." She pushed, feeling the momentum of the debriefing going in her favor. The head of the American Spaceflight Agency shook his head slowly at the machine sitting across from him. "Careful." he said simply, then leaned back and dismissed her with a wave. Long after she'd gone, the old man stared thoughtfully at the package from the Soviet agency.


	7. Tilly's Fifth Flight

PART 1: NADYA

>The City of Izhevsk's robotics plant was an imposing wide structure of only three stories yet covering an enormous footprint. The second largest robotics factory in the nation after Moscow's, production was still a laborious process that was always behind schedule, and demand was ever-increasing as the wealthier Party members each in turned claimed robots for themselves from the inventory. The factory manager tried to hide his displeasure at having to submit another of their hard-built machines to the Commandant of the nation's spaceflight administration. "Such a shame about Irina," he said in a pained tone as the elder man looked over a line of inactive machines inspecting each one carefully. "I'm sure she would have given you many years of flight time, but we just never planned for her to encounter that sort of radiation, a design flaw on our part I suppose." The Commandant held up his hand. "These things happen, it's why we use machines instead of people, they are easily replaced." The factory manager winced at 'easily', thinking of the countless hours he and his workers put into each robot they built even before the extensive conditioning training began at first boot, but said nothing of it to his superior. "This one with the green eyes, what's she called?" Peering intensely at one of the robots he didn't wait for a reply, grabbing at a small tag tied around her wrist carrying her designation. "'Nadya'. She will do, have her shipped to Baikonur."

>One week later the Commandant stood in front of her again, this time at the Cosmodrome after her first bootup with her new owner. Like Tatyana and Irina before her Nadya ran the gauntlet of endurance trials and intense study of procedures that would one day soon let her fly. When first informed of her purpose she'd enthusiastically accepted, though only because her desire to please her new master. Robots like her were becoming more common, and her early days of synthetic life at her home-factory learning to work and serve were filled with gossiped rumors and stories the other machines told of their kind fitting into all kinds of roles, as many as humans could find for them. Nadya had always been at the edges of these little gossip-groups, listening intently but rarely included by her classmate's choice. For reasons beyond her ability to process she'd found herself excluded by her sisters in their conversations between class, and once 'outside' had never found her way back 'inside' the friend group before being shut down and shipped to her new assignment. Serving not just her new master, but in effect ALL her master's countrymen gave Nadya a much-needed boost of confidence and a feeling of importance as she threw herself at the training demanded of her. Nadya's first true moment of hesitation came three weeks in when she'd been brought outside to a hastily-arranged range with rows of sandbags and a simple target at the far end. Much closer was what had caused Nadya to stop in place for a millisecond before doing as instructed. A long cannon with a strange design she'd never seen before sat in front of her, and when ordered she'd laid her hands on the weapon cautiously. Behind her were a team of engineers and scientists all eager to see if their new robot could be made to shoot what they'd built, and with them stood the Commandant to indulge the same curiosity. "I've never shot anything before sirs," Nadya said apologetically as she looked over her shoulder at the group. "But I'll try my best!" For the next two hours she put round after round down-range, and long-before the patience of the waiting men wore thin she'd mastered the strange weapon to their satisfaction and nearly her own. Improving her accuracy and ease with the machine had given her an unexpected thrill of fresh confidence, and she was almost sorry to be pulled away from it as the test concluded. That evening while she laid down to recharge in the little room kept for mechanical pilots, Nadya thought about the day's experience. She was glad to have performed well, but still left wondering without answers. "Why would they want me to learn to shoot?"

>Nadya's training progressed in a pattern that confused her, extra-vehicular-activity exercises in the pool one day and small arms shooting practice the next. Another week she practiced station-keeping burns by simulator to train for operating a low-orbiting spacecraft, then reported directly to a large military officer who gingerly at first instructed her on how to disarm a human opponent. After running through the exercise with him several times she'd finally had the courage to ask her instructor what she was learning this for, but the stern man had only shaken his head and said "I follow my orders just like you little robot". By week's end the man no longer had to be gentle when running her through a hand-to-hand drill, and she'd disarmed him of a knife nearly fast enough to have done it for real. During another neutrally-buoyant dive in the complex's wide indoor pool Nadya floated through the mock-up of her future spacecraft, going through the motions of moving around the vessel in zero-g but thinking more about her livelier training the previous week. After another week of alternating between the mundane and the unknown Nadya was brought into a concrete room with a mat placed on the floor at the center, again surrounded by several engineers and now military men all looking her way when she'd entered. At the corner of the mat stood a skinny man with a fearful look in sunken eyes that darted around the room until the robot was led inside. "That? Alright, yeah I got this then" he said with a nervous glance back at the guard who kept his hand tight on the man's shoulder. "If she's damaged it's another ten years," the guard said simply. He gulped, then turned back towards Nadya who gave him an uneasy glance to match his own. Behind her the engineer who'd led her here gave her a pat on the back. "This man will attempt to rush you, you must subdue him. Force is permitted, though lethal force will not be required for this task." Without waiting for a reply he gave a firm shove and Nadya was on the mat stumbling to regain her footing. The skinny prisoner didn't waste any time and took several steps forward, putting up his balled fists scarred by some previous untold violence. A reduced or even lifted sentence was worth boxing a robot a little, right? Nadya mimicked him while carefully watching his stance, and when he threw the first punch she was ready. She leaned away from the blow and caught the man by the wrist, turning it and her opponent around quickly. He gave a sharp cry of protest, but Nadya completed the maneuver she'd drilled repeatedly and lightly kicked the back of his knees to get him on his belly quickly. The engagement lasted all of four seconds and at the end the prisoner had begun to kick and struggle against her grip, but Nadya only tightened it harshly. Pressure-sensitive sensors at her fingertips registered a sudden crack from within the man's wrist and he cried out louder, cursing her. Quickly she let go and stood up, eager to take several steps back from him. One of the earliest things she'd been taught after taking her first steps between the factory assembly floor and the conditioning wing had been to avoid dealing such damage to fragile humans at all costs, yet the orders from her owners now superseded factory conditioning in a way that made her feel strange and unsure. Her handler for the day stepped forward and escorted her from the mat as two guards roughly hoisted her moaning opponent to his feet. "Very good!" Nadya was told, and after some uncertainty decided she agreed. She HAD done well.

>Early one afternoon Nadya had exited her simulator once more to see the old Commandant waiting for her. She'd not seen the busy man but a few times since he'd been there for her first boot at the Cosmodrome, and she smiled at seeing the familiar face. "Sir!" She happily saluted the old man who smirked sardonically at the military gesture. At his beckoning she followed him, and the two walked together across the complex. Nadya had wanted to ask about her strange mission, but didn't need to as the elder man began to speak first. "Very hush-hush this one, important. Come, I have a special invitation today and you should accompany me." She couldn't argue with the agency's head, didn't want to either. The pair left by car then transferred to train, a ride of several hours stretching between them and Kurchatov city, with nearly another hour from there out onto the steppe. Over the trip the Commandant had first regaled Nadya with tales of heroism from the last war, boastful bravado in booming baritones that made every story into a performance which she soaked up with relish. By the time he'd finished with his triumphant retelling of the fall of Berlin, Nadya was a dyed-in-the-wool patriot for her motherland and the people who lived there. It did not matter that the stories he'd told were borrowed and not his own, with the little machine's priorities now set correctly the Commandant began laying out the details of her upcoming mission. Nadya's vessel would be relatively small, a little less than the length of a school-bus, and would contain an array of sophisticated camera equipment and radar. "You see," the Commandant explained as they transferred from train to military truck in the remote city. "that doomed lunar mission with the Americans? Now they're using it as an excuse to pause cooperation with us, but I think what they're really doing is buying time. I suspect right now they are building up the resources needed for militarizing the space around the Earth, and the moon itself." Nadya gave him a worried look as they bounced around inside the rough cabin of the vehicle rumbling across the dirt road on the steppe. "You think they're going to shut us out from accessing space?" Nadya asked, processing this scenario for the first time. "The fact is we just don't know, which is where your mission comes into play." Their ride stopped near a thick concrete bunker set against a rise in the land, and they were escorted by military personnel inside. Sitting with a group of around twenty men mostly military and engineers, Nadya suddenly felt out of place despite her important escort. The Commandant tapped her lightly on the shoulder as she was looking around, and when she looked back to him he was offering a pair of dark sunglasses. Perplexed she took them but only held them for now, seeing the men around them each keeping theirs in hand as they made quiet serious small talk. "What are we doing here, Sir?" She asked in a lowered tone. The Commandant matched her volume, but spoke with deadly import. "Every advantage must be countered, if we lose our footing up there and the Americans take it for good you must realize that it would be the end for us, ALL of us" he said, then turned back towards the viewing window as a small radio crackled to life from a corner of the room and called out "sixty seconds". Around the room goggles and sunglasses started going onto faces, and Nadya was quick to keep up with her own borrowed glasses. Even through the thick dark glass covering her optics the flash was enough to offset the white-balance in her vision for several seconds, and she'd had to look away briefly. When she could refocus Nadya could see a distant fireball rising from the ground, roiling in on itself as it lifted and formed a distinctive tree-like shape. Around the bunker came some pleased 'oohs' and 'ahhs', but Nadya sat deathly-still as she watched the fireball darken into a still-rising cloud, memorized by the unrivaled spectacle. "T-that,?" she stuttered out incoherently, unable to tear her green optics off the vision of doomsday burned into the afternoon sky. "That Nadya, is what we can expect to have over our heads if the Americans put weapons in space."

>"Flight nominal, passing the horizon in fifteen minutes." Nadya called out with a shaky sigh from the command seat of her small station as it hurtled silently over the top of Earth's atmosphere. The violent force and noise of the launch had forced her again to recall the great explosion she'd witnessed, but her training saw her mostly-fearlessly through the stages of flight until the final cutoff placed her in low-orbit. Unstrapping from her seat she floated throughout her new home, inspecting the various stations proudly and allowing herself to thrill at the sensation of zero-g. She was now the operator of a spy satellite, and her new role as protector of her Master and his people had never felt so important. She breathed in and sighed happily. A low buzzing caught her attention, and turning her head she noticed a small moving shape that alarmed her. "A fly?" Forty-five minutes later Nadya breathed heavily to cool her CPU, a rolled up manual smeared with housefly clenched tightly in one hand. Predicting the strange flight patterns of the insect had proven more difficult than she'd assumed, and chasing it back and forth across the cabin had increasingly frustrated the machine to the point of near-madness. Calming herself back down took more effort than it should have, and she had to distract herself by unfolding the manual she'd used and reading to herself about the station's armament. "R-23M Kartech," she read out loud slowly, and tried to forget that her triumph over the fly left her alone once more with little to do up here.

>Every pass gave another chance to run the station's sensitive instruments, data gathered up and delivered home to the eager men of the agency and military. The photos of the American's launch complex were hard for Nadya to make heads or tails of herself, but every report radioed home brought a grateful thanks from mission control which made her feel fulfilled in her given task. A month prior she'd spotted a star moving against the background through the view-port and had nearly panicked herself into rebooting. She'd manned the Kartech cannon and gone over combat procedures on being boarded for nearly an hour before slowly realizing that nothing was coming. A bit of stray space junk perhaps, or an asteroid somewhere glinting for just a few minutes while it rotated endlessly, whatever it had been drove Nadya further into paranoia as she stayed vigilant for any approaching intruder. After the scare she'd spent a long time looking at the universal docking adapter from inside, computing every possible scenario she might have to endure should she fail to deter any approaching American vessels. "Anything that comes within 2 kilometers, turn to scrap. You are a military satellite, and cannot afford capture. If capture becomes inevitable, you must destroy the station and yourself," she'd been told shortly before launch. The orders had startled her at first, but made sense when she'd processed it. Getting caught spying in this fashion could easily be spun by the American media as a 'bad faith' move by her nation, potentially even a first strike of sorts. Secrecy was of the upmost importance, even if she had to defend that secrecy at the cost of her life.

>At the beginning of her third month in operation, Nadya finally had her resolve tested for real. The American launch had been spotted on the previous pass, and mission control had confirmed an object placed onto her orbit when she told them where to look. For a full day it crept up on her traveling only a little faster than the station so as to approach slowly, and she'd watched it by radar hour after hour as the distance between her craft and the American's shrank. A boarding party? Possible, but then humans or robots? Maybe it was a missile, and would accelerate hard after sneaking up close to disguise its true nature? "What if, ugh!" Nadya tried to shake off the speculation and found it impossible, her CPU buzzing like mad with the numerous possibilities. "Five kilometers, just what the hell ARE you?" Floating across the cabin Nadya focused the station's optical telescope and tried getting a look at the intruder to her airspace. During her training she'd learned to identify the American Agency's Capricorn and Libra capsules by sight, and noting the shape of the offending visitor gave her a shiver down her spinal struts. "It's a ship!" For a moment she froze up, despite having prepared for just this moment. What if it were a human crew? She narrowed her optics at the enlarged image of the vessel and set her CPU to the task, re-processing her crystal-clear orders. "Turn it to scrap."

>Three hours after the American vessel was spotted, it crossed the two kilometer invisible boundary and entered Nadya's approved area of engagement. She was quick to maneuver the station so that the stationary cannon was aimed in the correct direction, then gripped the firing controls for the specialized weapon. "Just a little closer," she muttered to herself as she stared out through the glass at the approaching vehicle. It made no apparent attempt on Nadya's station, and for several minutes simply floated up towards it, rotating slowly and exposing several camera lenses glinting in the service bay. CPU overclocking hard Nadia pressed the trigger and the station was rocked by sudden vibration and noise. The shaking rattled her sensors, but she held onto the weapon as it discharged round after round at the enemy ship. Looking through the view port she watched the steel slugs zip out from her station's armament and tear through the American's ship. Solar panels shattered, tiles from the heat shield spiraled off, glass broke off into shards that spread out in a cloud. Nadya kept firing, a brief frenzy overtaking her as she ruthlessly fulfilled her Master's command. One round struck a compressed tank of some gas and the resultant venting sent the crippled capsule spinning away from Nadya's station behind her. Debris from the encounter remained in place next to her, and for the next hours Nadya would be able to hear each piece as it bounced harmlessly off the station's hull. For several minutes she floated there in silence with her hands gripping the controls of the station's cannon tightly. She'd done it, the station was defended and the enemy defeated. Slowly willing herself down from overclocking, she had to focus to let go of the gun before floating to the radio, letting out a long nervous laugh before she could try talking to anyone back home. "Whew, c'mon Nadya be professional!" Turning on the encrypted transmission, she kept her tone even and made her update in previously-established code. "Almez-1 calling mission control: I swatted a fly today..."

PART 2: TILLY

>Orbiting high above the Earth yet low against the top of the atmosphere, Tilly's terminally-damaged capsule continually slowed as pressurized oxidizer sprayed out from a bullet wound to the service module. The moment the rounds had begun to strike she had shut her optics in fright as her ship was torn asunder around her. Panting to cool an overworked CPU, she looked around now the ruined cabin of her capsule, glass and shrapnel floating around her in a cloud. Internally an important set of components failed a regular check and she looked down at herself. Her left leg was unresponsive, most of the connective material lost when one of those heavy slugs had torn through it leaving only wires and her outer plating to keep the limb attached. Looking back up at the ruined control panel Tilly tried taking stock of her predicament. The capsule's power was ebbing away, leaking and only powering herself now that the controls floated in pieces around her. Through the remains of the porthole Tilly could see open space, and nearly reached out to put a testing hand through the open hole as if it weren't real. "Now what?" she muttered weakly to herself as she stared at the edge of the atmosphere below.

>One month prior she'd been on the grounds of the launch complex, settling in once again to her default role of coffee delivery-bot. After she and Tatyana's return from the moon together Tilly had been optimistic about future missions together, but the chilling of relations between the rival space agencies after the failure of the first joint mission had put a stop to all talks between them regardless of the cooperation the two latter robots had displayed. "Idiots," she'd thought privately to herself one day in the break room. "Just hurry up and go fly together already, what's wrong with you humans?" A few days later a pair of black vehicles had arrived at the complex together, suited men filing out with clear guards standing beside their cars. Tilly had seen this only from the astronaut building as she was leaving it, and wondered for the rest of the day what sort of visitors her launch complex had gotten. The day following the strange visit she'd been in the break room of the administration building again when Georges, now assistant-director, had barged into the room and violently kicked a garbage can. "Bastards! Every single stinking Sterling suit!? BASTARDS!" Tilly looked at him in shock, his occasional bouts of extreme anger frightened her and she'd never quite learned how to handle it. Finally noticing the nandroid in the room, Georges put a hand to his sweaty forehead and sighed. "Sorry, sorry, I know," he apologized, then holding up both hands in defense. "But Til those people are devious, I swear! We get ONE little visit from the Department of Defense and suddenly the next day we're on Sterling's shit-list? I wanna know how THEY knew, those sneaky pricks!" Stomping around the room Georges ranted, and Tilly struggled to keep up. "What do you mean Sir? What did Sterling do?" she asked cautiously, nervous about another outburst from the man. "It's what they're NOT doing! We've been working on getting a replacement for Kimmy but suddenly today they're saying she wasn't under warranty after leaving the atmosphere, can you believe that shit? I mean they still serviced YOU didn't they?" Georges seemed to be reasoning with her, and she could only nod in agreement with him. "And it's worse! They don't want to even SELL us any new nandroids now that the DoD spooks have been shopping around here, I guess Sterling only likes to do their military business through subsidiaries." Shaking his head, Georges put his hands on his hips and looked away, adding "Sneaky fuckers wouldn't want their squeaky-clean little nandroids getting associated with war machines, right?" As Tilly followed the rant, the situation crystallized for her and she had to suppress a small smile as the realization processed. "You're not going to get any replacement pilots for a while, then?" Staring at her a long moment, Georges eventually smirked and shook his head at the too-eager robot. "Yeah guess that's about the gist of it, looks like we'll have another job for you"

>Unlike previous missions, specifics of this upcoming flight were vague in a way that made Tilly feel strange, as if she were doing something she wasn't supposed to. Most of her training updates had been studying various aspects of orbital photography, both of the ground and other objects in orbit, and she'd been drilled again in the simulator on the practice of changing orbits to rendezvous with another craft. "Can you at least give me some kind of idea of just what it is I'm supposed to be doing up there?" She'd asked of Collins, a relative stranger to her who'd joined the team during her Venus flight in order to handle preparation of new nandroid pilots. Since losing Kimmy and being denied any new replacement, the man had been annoyed but did his best to hide it. "I don't know much more than you, you won't be up for long and you'll be doing some photography. Beyond that ask Georges, this mission is his problem. Finding Georges on a smoke-break hadn't been too difficult, and cornered the man had given up a few extra details to Tilly's needling. "It's a flight for the DoD, but a real quiet one right?" Taking a drag he blew the offensive smoke above the nandroid's head before continuing. "The Department, and a lot of other folks up in D.C. want to know what the ruskies are up to over there." Looking back and forth for anyone listening in, he leaned down close to Tilly's face, the harsh smell of tobacco making her want to recoil. "Rumor is they're scared of the reds putting weapons up there, and a few of the louder Senators are flapping their gums about the joint moon mission maybe being sabotaged by 'em too!" Tilly nearly jumped, a chill running down her spinal struts as she thought about Irina and Kimmy motionless on the lunar surface. "W-well that's just....lunacy?" she said, forcing a grin at her cliche pun. Georges choked on his smoke and laughed out loud. "Couldn't have said it better myself, HA!" he exclaimed, and roughly slapped her back enough to make her stumble. 

>A final coast phase separated the initial burn of the first and second stage from the orbital insertion burn when the second stage re-lit and circularized the capsule's orbit. During the minutes waiting for the second burn Tilly re-processed the uncertain thoughts that had crossed her CPU the previous night. No public had been permitted to watch the launch nor did they know it was happening, and the secret nature of the mission made her feel she was definitely doing something wrong. "Is this really a good flight?" She'd asked herself before recharge the previous night. "Should I be doing this one?" As the engine burned and died out placing her on orbit, Tilly tried to shake the thoughts loose and focus on the familiar sight of the world outside the porthole below. Somehow each time she'd seen this sight had carried a different feeling, and comparing the memory files gave her a sense of perspective on how much she'd done since that first flight. Over the following two days, Tilly's capsule passed again and again over the Soviet Union, photographing areas of interest marked in advance by someone deep within the Department of Defense. The work was easy, but somehow Tilly felt lessened by it, the wonder and joy of feeling weightless again dampened by such underhanded spying. At the third day of her flight she performed a short burn to change her orbit following a strangely terse transmission from mission control. The order came to close distance with an 'object of interest' as the unfamiliar radio operator had put it, and photograph it up close. The change in the mission gave Tilly a bad feeling, processor running wild with speculation on just what an 'object of interest' could be, but she dutifully followed her orders and slowly drifted towards the unknown satellite from half a world away. Three hours after beginning the approach, Tilly could see a defined point of light through the glass growing steadily closer. "Is it...a capsule?" she asked to nobody as she gazed out through the window. Over the next forty-five minutes the object came into focus as the distance closed, and Tilly was reminded of her Venus flyby habitat. Was it manned? She checked her radar and saw that she was approaching within a mile of the strange ship, and adjusted her trajectory ever-so-slightly to lazily drift by at an even closer distance. Whatever it was, she was going to take some pictures. When the slow-speed flyby occurred, Tilly changed her ship's orientation to point the service module's cameras at the vessel and from this angle got a good look of it through the porthole. It was a tapered tube, an engine at one end and a docking port at the other, and bristling with three wide solar panels, a sun shade, antenna and what Tilly thought might be an auxiliary antenna. At once the foreign station began to rotate, and Tilly gasped as she caught a glimpse through the station porthole of the pilot's steel face for just a moment. Then the shooting began, and the next moments were a violent blur.

>Ninety minutes passed after the attack and Tilly's uncontrolled capsule orbited once more, skimming through the top of the atmosphere for several minutes at periapsis and losing even more velocity needed to overcome the planet's pull. She could do nothing with the control panel shot through, and instead had focused her efforts first on wrapping the damage to her leg in order to hold in as much heat as her suit and CPU could generate now that the capsule had cooled to the ambient temperature outside. Next she checked over her emergency parachute, and was relieved that it was unscathed. After her first flight had suffered parachute failure of the capsule, the extra precaution had been part of the standard load-out for all robot-driven missions since. Without getting out to look around the outside, Tilly had no way of knowing if the capsule's chutes were still intact, and was glad to have a way out. As her ship began the gradual drift down into the atmosphere, Tilly watched grimly as she passed the terminator line into Earth's night-side. Even with the benefit of sunlight it was hard for her to point out nations without a map to reference, geography had not been part of her study at the Agency. Now in darkness with only the twinkling of city lights below matching the unblinking stars above she couldn't begin to guess where she was heading. Tumbling slowly the ship began to meet more resistance as the air grew thicker around it, and after several minutes Tilly was shaking in her seat as the oscillation increased harshly. The shriek of tearing metal reverberated through the cabin and the capsule spun wildly. She tried to catch a glimpse of the service module breaking away, but all she saw was the yellow-white heated atmosphere catching on the open hole in the craft and heating the cabin rapidly. The next two minutes were as chaotic as the attack by the station, Tilly's capsule rolled and rattled as it plunged deeper into the atmosphere. The shield below her was shot through in places, and the heating was melting through the bottom of the capsule raising the cabin's temperature even more. Breathing hard to try and get rid of the heat, she unfastened her helmet and let it fall away. Part of the hatch and the hull next to it were glowing, and the door began to rattle on its hinges. She reached for it and took hold of the handle, trying futilely to keep the doorway from opening. The capsule was slowing but still burning as one of the hinges holding the hatch on burned through and the rushing air caught the edge. Tilly was still gripping the handle tightly when it swung open violently, tearing her out of her seat-belt faster than she could process it. The capsule rotated under the new aerodynamics and in an instant the other hinge snapped, sending the hatch flying away from the burning vessel with Tilly clinging to it for dear life.

>She barely had time to react or even process the numerous instantaneous heat-warnings her system flashed at her, the hatch spun once then oriented with her weight on top of it, shielding her from the intense heat now striking the other side. She gripped the handle hard and tried to get a hold on the open porthole, but quickly pulled her hand back missing the tips of three digits. A heat warning went off in her left thigh then went silent as she looked down just in time to see her ruined leg dangle off the edge and be wrenched clean with hardly any resistance. Smaller than the heavy spacecraft, the hatch and its passenger bled off speed quickly. After only thirty seconds of this unpleasant reentry her speed had slowed to only supersonic, the air below her no longer pressurizing to plasma. With the glow gone her vision went with it, and the only thing she caught a glimpse of was the still-burning debris of her capsule in the distance until it winked out of view. The steel of the hatch was warm even through her insulated suit, but cooling rapidly now as it hurtled down through the clouds. Pulling her knees up beneath her, Tilly counted to three before kicking off with her remaining foot. Free of the top-heavy weight the hatch spun away from her, and she spun as well trying to discern for a moment which set of twinkling lights in her rotating field of view were stars and which were distant cities. Stretching her battered limbs out she oriented herself face-down, and saw only darkness beneath her. With the wind rushing up at her, Tilly silently thanked Sterling servicing technicians for giving her an internal altimeter, as it was now the only thing telling her whether she was five miles up or two seconds from impact. At two thousand feet she pulled at the ripcord and deployed her parachute, feeling the sudden lurch of deceleration a few seconds later. Her internal accelerator still read her speed as worryingly fast, and though she couldn't see it she could hear wind rushing through a hole that had melted through the nylon material during re-entry. Looking up at the darkness in frustration, Tilly could only give a groan at her misfortune, narrowing her optics angrily at the damaged chute. "Oh fuck you"

PART 3: EHRI

>Evening ended like so many had in the past few years for Ehri after sunset. The evening chores had all been finished, and she'd sat with her elderly owners while they ate the simple noodle soup she'd prepared for them in their cozy Ger. They enjoyed her company, and she enjoyed theirs, having been assigned to the task almost five years ago now. The aging pair had been prosperous nomads in their prime, possessing a sizable herd of Kashmir goats back when the family had been large and had worked together. As time had marched on and local politics had changed, the herd had shrunk nearly to nothing and was now kept more for pride than practicality. Children long-since grown had attended school in Ulaanbaatar nearly one hundred and twenty kilometers away, and as their parents became the last of the group to carry on the lifestyle they'd been raised under had made sure to keep them financially solvent and comfortable despite their refusal to move into the city. At first it had been easy, despite advanced age the elderly couple alone were well-equipped to take care of themselves and had at first shooed off any attempts by their city-bound children to coddle them. Years of hard work accumulated though, and not even the clean air of the steppes could keep them youthful forever. Their eldest son Ganbold had been the one to seek out and purchase a second-hand machine at market, meant to care for his stubborn elders during the times that they could not care for themselves. Ehri was an American product, beyond warranty but not officially outmoded by the time she'd been shipped overseas for resale. The beginnings of her life were a mystery even to her thanks to a harddrive-swap somewhere in eastern Europe, before her eventual arrival in central Asia that robbed her forever of her early memories. The lack of memory hadn't bothered her however, and of her numerous short assignments to various owners in the last decade, her life on the flat landscape of the steppe had been by far the most peaceful and fulfilling. Seeing her grateful owners to their sleep, Ehri stepped outside the rounded structure to be alone for a few minutes before plugging herself in to the solar-charged battery she relied on for life. Above her stretched the heavens, stars unencumbered by city lights with the wide band of the Milky Way naked for her to see. When she stared upwards at the spectacle, her CPU only processed the beauty of it and her contentment with life here, to her the stars may as well have been a pretty painting to be observed each night. Tonight the slowly-moving work of art above her was marked by something new however. Shooting stars were not something new to Ehri, she'd seen hundreds during these nightly viewings of the sky and a few had been large enough to take several seconds to arc across the sky unlike the average quick zip of a small meteor. This was not an average shooting star however, and with uncertain optics full of wonder she watched a bright fireball cross slowly above her, eventually trailing bits that became shooting stars of their own. She had never seen anything quite like it, and kept her optics on the object until it cooled and dimmed beyond her sight. Lifting the brim of her fur hat from her optics, she gaped at the sight. "What on Earth?" she said to herself softly in the tongue of her owners.

>The following morning Ehri raced through her tasks, finishing her chores faster than her usual practiced pace. She'd thought about the strange vision in the sky all morning, and by noon had been given free reign of the camp. Outside she stopped in front of a gas-powered generator, meant for charging herself and her fellow mechanical if overcast weather rendered the camp's large solar cells useless. Teneg was a hefty robotic beast, an imitation only of its natural counterpart but stronger and more obedient than a yak. Ehri had given the machine its name after first attempting to wrangle it after the unexpected delivery by her master's son, but had come to treasure the simple automaton during the brief periods it was online. Checking over the charge which had been building from the solar cell's excess for days, Ehri made the decision to activate Teneg. The steel-plated quadruped, adorned with an array of ad-hoc replacement parts added over the years, gave a shudder as it booted and blinked dull brown optics at Ehri, awaiting instruction. Fifteen minutes later the encampment she and her owners called home for now was a distant point behind her as Ehri raced across the landscape atop her thoughtless mount. Riding Teneg came second nature to her after several years of handling the galloping machine, and she'd learned not simply to hang on but to guide the mechanoid expertly. The strange light in the sky the previous night had arced out of the west and seemed to fall somewhere north of camp, and that was where Ehri now headed following her computed trajectory of the mysterious light. Bouncing along on Teneg's built-in saddle she wasn't sure what to look for or even expect, but it was an interesting enough excuse for a long ride regardless of if she found anything or not. She had explored the surroundings of each encampment her owners made season to season sometimes out to a distance of thirty kilometers or more, but hardly ever in search of anything other than a missing goat. This afternoon took her farther from her transient home than she'd been since her last visit to the capital several days away, but with her duties accomplished early and the sight of the falling star replaying on her CPU she was compelled to go searching for whatever had caused the brilliant light.

>Ehri stopped for a moment but did not dismount, staring down at a hand-sized bit of blackened metal in the small crater it had made on impact. "Whatever it is, it's fresh," she said to Teneg quietly, who shook its head imitating a living thing. The wind here would soon smooth the edges of the crater down, but now Ehri was certain it was related to what she'd seen the previous night. "Too small though, that couldn't have been all of it." Galloping along further she replayed the file and studied each frame internally. It had been more than one light, she realized on inspection, rather several pieces that seemed to be breaking off from the largest. Within minutes she'd passed two more small craters filled with burnt metal, and a third which contained debris Ehri could swear looked just like her own foot. After another half an hour of trotting through the wide field of far-scattered debris she spotted what seemed to be a fresh black scar on the horizon, and smiled. "That's got to be it!" Giving a pull at Teneg's reigns the pair turned, but before she could urge him onward she spotted something else. Raising a small hand to her brow Ehri shielded her optics from the sun and watched the distant shape for a full minute. It was moving, slowly but definitely not a trick of the light. A sense of worry came over Ehri and she looked down her dimwitted mount quickly. "Teneg, it looks like somebody crawling!" She looked back up and searched the surrounding landscape, her mission to find the fallen star momentarily forgotten, and saw little else to indicate where the figure might have come from. Settling herself on a new task, Ehri gave a short snap of the reigns and spurred the mechanical bull forward, racing across the flat ground towards the figure. Whoever it was, she thought to herself, they were clearly in trouble.

>At full-gallop it had only taken ten minutes to close the distance between Ehri and the crawling figure, and as they slowed to a halt she hopped off. "Hey! Are you alright?" she called out in her adopted tongue, jogging a few steps forward and meeting the stranger's gaze when she looked up. Ehri saw at once that it wasn't a person at all, but instead a nandroid like herself. Seeing another of her kind all the way out here gave her a momentary shock, but not nearly as much as did the state of her fellow robot. Oddly-short orange hair was singed along a portion of her head and the right blue optic was dim, shattered by whatever had dented the faceplate there. Parts of the nandroid's strange attire were burnt and ripped, and the left leg below the thigh was missing entirely with a few exposed wires dragging behind. The sight of the damaged machine almost made Ehri recoil, but she instead knelt and offered a hand with a smile. Blinking her remaining optic the strange nandroid lifted a hand missing digits and tried to grip hers, then fell back to the ground and ceased moving. "Eh?" Ehri lifted the nandroid's head for a moment and examined it. "Out of charge?" She wondered inquisitively, then nodded. "Gotta be. Alright!" Nandroids weren't so heavy that one could not lift another, but even still it was a struggle for Ehri to drag the motionless robot over to Teneg and heft her onto its back. Minutes later the three machines were galloping again across the open land towards camp, Ehri glancing back every few seconds at her passenger. "Just hold on, we'll get you powered again!"

>Ehri had to wait four days until the battery banks connected to the solar cells had gathered enough excess energy to charge both herself and her guest for the day, but had at last hooked the unresponsive robot to the charger at sunset. Sitting on a flattened blanket in the small auxiliary tent that housed Teneg and herself, Ehri did her best to finish cleaning up the charging nandroid. Dirt was scrubbed where it could be found, and she wrapped a rag around the broken optic to keep any more from falling in through the cracks. While trying to brush the blackened soot from the burnt portions of the nandroid's odd suit, Ehri gasped in recognition and began wildly speculating about who this machine might be. "American?" She'd asked out loud to herself as she brushed her fingers over the discolored flag patch on the right shoulder. She'd learned after-the-fact that she herself was originally a product of America as well, a forgotten lifetime and several owners ago. Aside from the damage to the stranger and Ehri's own long dark hair they weren't that dissimilar in build, maybe a few model generations separate in some minor internal details, she thought. "Wait, do I even still know english?" Ehri asked herself as the thought suddenly occurred to her. Putting a hand to her chin and looking off for a moment, she tried to read the relevant files internally but found only a few scraps, disconnected word translations with few useful ones coming up at first search. Frustrated, she laid herself down on her blanket and closed her optics to put herself in sleep-mode, resolving to de-fragment herself and locate enough of her language files to attempt communicating for the morning.

>Tilly regained consciousness after rebooting some time after dawn the following morning. She was groggy at first, having suffered a CPU-rattling blow to the head on landing that had cost her an optic. She groaned quietly and brought a hand up to her faceplate only to see three fingers missing at the second joints. She remembered re-entry, riding the hatch and burning, the impact. "My leg," she muttered, and leaned herself up on her elbows slowly. Much of her body felt out of sorts, outer plating in several spots no longer sat flush at the cracks, joints ground with bits of sand stuck in them, and hydraulics responded sluggishly as if the fluid was breaking down. Looking down at herself she winced at the unsettling void where her limb had been. "That's right." Recalling the attack on her capsule she sighed and looked around herself. Some sort of tent she thought, though she'd never seen one made of natural materials like this. "Where am I?" she moved to stand without thinking, but found herself unable to complete the motion now, and caught herself with both arms as she fell forward. The flap of hide at the entrance to the tent opened and she looked up to see another nandroid, dressed exotically in clothes she'd never seen before. The foreign robot took one look at Tilly and her faceplate lit up. "Oh hi!" 

>Ehri grinned when she entered her tent and saw the rescued nandroid online and moving. She tried greeting her, but the words felt unfamiliar and so she tried to let her simulated body language speak for her instead. Kneeling for a moment she helped her guest into a sitting position before moving to the chest of tools set against one wall. Several years ago she'd taken a tumble and snapped her own leg's frame, requiring a long wait before an offcolor replacement could be sourced and delivered by Ganbold. During the intervening months she'd had to make do with a limb cobbled together from scrap, and now was glad to have kept it after the replacement had been installed. "Leg!" She said in english, recalling the scrap of language file as she held the makeshift limb up for her guest to see. The nandroid looked at it with uncertainty, then back down at herself. Ehri didn't waste time and knelt beside the confused robot, rolling up the loose material of her suit's leg and positioning the prosthetic carefully. The orange-haired nandroid watched cautiously, but made no move other than to ask a question hesitantly. The sentence sounded strange to Ehri, but she'd understood the 'who' part of what she'd been asked. Looking up she gave the nandroid a friendly smile and tapped herself on the chest. "Ehri!" She announced her name cheerfully, then reached out and gently tapped the other machine's chest with one finger and cocked her head inquisitively. "You?" The strange robot blinked one good optic at her before a more relieved smile crossed her dented faceplate. "Tilly."

>Over the following week the two nandroid's had done their best to communicate, often through pantomime and imitations of human body language. A small patch of bare earth just outside of Eheri's yurt served as a makeshift chalkboard for them, and any idea more complex than they knew how to act out was instead drawn, often poorly. Tilly had asked through mime 'where is this?' and Ehri had drawn an unfamiliar shape that she hadn't known how to interpret. When Ehri had used hand gestures and broken english to ask "Where did you come from?", she'd been unsatisfied with Tilly simply pointing upwards. Employing her meager art skills the astrobot had attempted to draw a simple rocket with a wide plume of exhaust. After a few seconds of staring at the attempted drawing, Ehri raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at her. "Carrot?" Tilly laughed, and Ehri easily laughed along with her. The spacesuit had been ditched as soon as Tilly had been able to stand, and the space-faring robot now dressed like her host in a thick coat she'd called 'deel' that crossed in the front and was tied with a wide belt around the midsection. The billowy fabric had left Tilly feeling like she was swimming in it as she hobbled along on her unresponsive prosthetic leg and cane, but she'd liked how it looked on her when Ehri had given her a small compact mirror to examine herself through. Looking into it for the first time made her wince, and she'd touched the distorted metal of her faceplate and patched-over optic gingerly with her good hand. Ehri had done her best to keep her new friend in good spirits, involving her in chores as best she was able to be and continually jumping from her owners back to the smaller ger outside to check on both. Several times now, she'd caught Tilly looking either sadly upwards or into the distance at nothing, lost in her own strange processing. "Eh!" Ehri said with a smile, a friendly greeting both had come to recognize and use between each other. She'd left the dwelling of her owners after they'd put themselves to bed, and found Tilly sitting beside the entrance to their shared tent, propped up on her arms and looking upwards again at the wide swath of stars in the night sky. Glancing from them over to her new friend Tilly smiled and returned the greeting. "'eh Ehri." Pulling the bottom of her coat up first, Ehri sat down beside her and followed her gaze up. "Want back soon?" she asked innocently, and Tilly blinked her good optic. "Back? I don't know..." she trailed off, staring upwards and thinking about the hostile satellite. Somewhere up there a dangerous robot operated an armed station, and for the first time in her strange career as astrobot she had something besides accident to fear when she next flew. "No no!" Ehri said vehemently, shaking her head and tapping at her shoulder where Tilly's flag patch had been. "BACK soon?" 

>Preparations were made the following day, and both nandroids charged themselves to capacity that evening and dumped the remaining power from the battery banks into Teneg. Tilly had no idea what the nomad had in store her her, but at this point had enough trust in her new friend to go along with whatever she had planned. Before settling in to sleepmode for the night, Tilly had tried asking again what kind of trip exactly they'd packed for, but Ehri only understood a quarter of what she said and offered a shrug. "City! Sleepmode, tomorrow ride ok?" Tilly couldn't exactly argue, and simply nodded before resting on her outstretched blanket and setting her bootup for eight hours forward. Before the internal automatic prompt could boot her back up, Ehri was shaking her shoulder and calling out their greeting. Blinking one glowing blue optic in the pre-dawn light, Tilly brushed off Ehri's hand and sat up. "Right right, I'm up!" Grabbing the short worn cane Ehri had given her Tilly shakily pulled herself to her feet, stabilizing the dead prosthetic to support her weight evenly. "Let's do this!" 

>The rest of the day stretching into dusk was spent on the back of Teneg the mechanical bull, trotting along at an efficient pace. They'd tried to make small-talk as best they could, but the language barrier made such efforts fruitless. On the open landscape there wasn't much that either could point out and talk about either, though Tilly still found herself enthralled seeing the strange part of the world she'd landed in. When the sun was setting they'd stopped, and Ehri had unpacked a small tent from their mount and set up. Teneg remained powered down when not being rode, and the nandroids powered themselves off the charge they'd generated off the mechanoid's attached solar panels which covered the flank during long-duration rides like theirs. Ehri had made this trip over fifty times during her half-decade of nomad life, enough times to know the power limits of both herself and her mount. A full recharge would be there for them all when they reached Ulaanbaatar, she thought to herself as she and Tilly lay beside one another in their tiny shared tent. The next two days followed an identical pattern, by day they rode and collected sunlight to power themselves, and by night they made camp and recharged. Ehri had gone for years not charging to full-capacity each night, solar power was often varied and some days she'd barely gotten enough to operate without resorting to generator power. Tilly was not so conditioned to it though, and functioning under half her battery's capacity left her feeling over-taxed with every movement. Once while riding Teneg behind Ehri she'd inadvertently slipped into sleep-mode due to an internal monitoring algorithm assuming that her low-power state and lack of activity meant she needed recharging, and she'd fallen off the mechanical mount's back. On the fourth day both of them had whooped and cheered upon seeing the distant but unmistakable shape of a city on the horizon. For Ehri it meant the nearing the end of this leg of the long journey back to the city for this month, but for Tilly it was her first glimpse of relative civilization in two weeks. That evening they camped with the glow of the city persistent on the horizon, and Tilly shut down wondering what was in store for them when they arrived tomorrow.

>After several more hours of travel they reached a paved road and began to follow it along the shoulder, passing an airport along the outskirts as they moved into the city proper. The metropolis seemed foreign to Tilly, and it wasn't simply the signage being unintelligible to her in this strange country but being surrounded by buildings again after even a short time spent in the open wilderness with her host. The city reminded her of Tampa near the launch complex she'd left just a couple weeks earlier, wide and spread out with many short buildings interrupted by the occasional taller structure. None of the pedestrians they passed seemed to take notice of their strange dress or their mechanical mount, and Tilly spotted at least three others like Teneg being used as they passed through the city. Other robots as well, designs and models she'd never seen before roamed the streets alongside the humans they served. She was distracted by the unfamiliar sights, and when Ehri brought Teneg to a stop she bumped into the steppe-bot's back. "Here! Want go home, yah?" Ehri gave her a wide triumphant smile. Tapping her shoulder where Tilly's flag patch had been, she pointed up above them. Flying outside the building they'd stopped in front of was the American flag. Tilly blinked her good eye and read the small plaque placed outside the structure. "US Embassy," she muttered out loud in disbelief, then matched Ehri's wide grin and put her arms around her with a laugh. "Thank you!"

>Ehri helped Tilly dismount, the damaged nandroid unable to stand without the added balance of the cane. A pair of guards outside the embassy gates had eyed them curiously when they'd stopped, and were speaking inaudibly with each other about the strange machines. "Good?" Ehri asked as she held Tilly's shoulders to steady her. Tilly nodded and smiled warmly. "Yes, thank you, for everything." Ehri matched her expression and hugged her again. "Eh soon, kay?" she said when she released Tilly, and reached into an inner pocket on her large jacket. Pulling out a small bit of cardboard salvaged from some packaging, she handed it to Tilly as one of the guards from the embassy began walking towards them. The handwriting was hard to read but printed in usable english, spelling out an address. Ehri beamed when Tilly took her forwarding address. "Kay!" Tilly answered back enthusiastically, matching her smile as she turned to great the Embassy guard. "Hello Sir! I need to get in contact with the United States Spaceflight Agency! Can you help me?"

EPILOGUE

NADYA  
>"Standby" was the last order Nadya had received, over a week ago now. Photographs had been taken and transmitted home, but no congratulatory messages ever responded to them. After several days she had become restless, nervous and desperate for any kind of reply. "I know you can hear me, so say something already!" she'd shouted into the void, without any response. She'd done her job well, hadn't she? Why wouldn't anyone tell her so? After days of no contact with home, Nadya grew paranoid. Perhaps her signal and the messages from home were being blocked somehow? Perhaps mission control was only relaying instructions while she was in sleepmode by some coincidence, and perhaps the radio equipment had failed to record the transmissions? Resolving not to miss a single message, Nadya began forgoing sleepmode, charging while awake and keeping constant vigil over both the radar and radio. 

EHRI  
>It had taken a further five days to return to her family's current site, but arriving had given her a satisfying sort of relief. As with any of her long jaunts into the city to resupply each month, Ehri unpacked from Teneg the supplies she'd bought until the mechanical beast was unloaded completely. Her masters had seen themselves to bed not long after she'd returned, and leaving their ger she stopped outside her and Teneg's small tent. Looking at the bare patch of Earth where she had Tilly had drawn to communicate, she sat down where she had with her strange friend the night before their trip to Ulaanbaatar began. Staring upwards, she tried to envision what she'd thought the American nandroid had said, and pictured a vessel arcing across the sky. Unlike all others, tonight Ehri wondered about what might be above her, rather than simply admiring the pretty lights from her place on the steppe.

TILLY  
>Three bus-rides and and as many flights later, Tilly was back on American soil. Greeting her as she got off her final plane was Georges, standing tall in a beige suit that did not at all compliment him. "Tilly! we all thought you were dead! God, I've never been so glad to be wrong!" He exclaimed cheerfully, making Tilly wince as she descended the airliner's stairs and stood level with her superior's chest balanced on her cane. "Yep, I made it Sir!" She responded with a smile, then added "and if you ever try sending me on a DoD mission again I'm declaring myself an outmode."


	8. Tilly's Sixth Flight

>"This is the place?" Tilly asked from the backseat of Collin's nondescript old car, parked on the street outside of a run-down shop. She had never been to this part of the city, and hadn't had any inkling that Tampa might have unsafe-seeming areas like this when she'd walked off the night before her first trip to the moon over two years prior. "This is it, hang on I'll get your door," Collins replied back casually as he exited the vehicle and came around to help the nandroid out of the backseat. She had been missing and presumed lost for two weeks when the call had been connected through from the US Embassy in the Mongolian city of Ulaanbaatar, and had spent a further four days in transit back to the United States. When she'd returned attempts had been made at once to contact Sterling for servicing of the broken robot, but still standoffish regarding Tilly's most recent flight the company representative had politely given them the runaround until it was clear that they were not interested in honoring her warranty at this time. Hobbling slowly on Ehri's old unpowered prosthetic and supported by Collins' arm around her shoulders, Tilly made her way across the street and into the dingy establishment. Without Sterling's expert mechanics to bring Tilly back to factory-spec, Assistant Director Georges had made the decision to send her to a third-party repair shop, and had even financed the refurbishment out of his own pocket. "Don't worry about it, I can take the bus to work for now," he had said to her when she'd inquired about the cost before leaving with Collins. "you're our only robot and you can't fly with a bum leg."

>"Holy shit, you pull her outta Stress Testing or something pal?" came the greeting from the front desk of the second-hand shop as they entered. Around them were an array of electronics and robotics components in various states of repair, every nook and cranny of the shack-like structure filled beyond capacity with what seemed to be scrap from a million different places. Behind the desk the attending mechanic stood up, staring through foggy glasses at the damaged machine that had just limped in. "Something like that. Can you get her back to working order?" Collins replied tersely. Even if the mission that had caused this damage wasn't classified he still wanted to avoid unwanted attention in this neighborhood, and had told Tilly to switch out of her blue jumpsuit back into her old factory-standard Sterling dress before leaving. Coming out from behind the counter, the thin wiry man pushed up his glasses and gave Tilly a slow look up and down. "I mean nothing looks absolutely irreparable here, but at the cost you're looking at you might be better off buying a new one." Tilly gave the long-haired man an annoyed look, narrowing her good optic at him. "Come on Sir, we can get a second opinion from a more reputable establishment," she said dismissively and moved to turn herself towards the door to both the human's surprise. "Hold on hold on I didn't say I couldn't, or wouldn't!" the mechanic said defensively, giving Collins a strained smile. "If you're willing to foot the bill on this job then I'm more than willing! We can start now if you want?" Clasping his hands together, the greasy mechanic hoped the potentially lucrative job wasn't about to slip away from him. Collins gave a short nod, having no mood or even skill to shop around or haggle. "Deal, sooner she's fixed up and out of here the better."

>Being repaired was a strange experience for Tilly, during both of her previous servicing visits to Sterling she'd been shut down and had simply booted back up some time later with the work already finished. This mechanic however made no such attempt to power her down, and Tilly felt herself somewhat unwilling to let some stranger tinker around without supervision even if he had. Dress neatly folded and set aside she lay bare on a flat stainless steel table, surrounded by an array of tools affixed to the walls of the shop's back garage. "That spare of yours looks like its just made of some old pipes, so let's start with that," the mechanic said with a smile as he began carefully unscrewing the makeshift limb from the broken stump where Ehri had haphazardly attached it. "Hey now that it's just us," he said more quietly, pulling away the prosthetic and going to work removing what remained of her old leg at the knee joint. "That guy you came in with, he didn't do all this to you, did he? 'Cause I know a lot of 'aggressively' outmode-friendly people if-" Tilly snickered and shook her head, closing her good optic. "No no, nothing like that really, I appreciate it though," she answered him confidently. "But out of curiosity, just what do you mean by 'outmode-friendly'?" For the first time since she'd come back from space again she thought about her forestalled retirement, and what she was meant to do with herself when there were no more flights for her to take. Removing the crumbling plating and framework from her knee, the mechanic chuckled knowingly as he walked off to fetch a limb as closely matching hers as he could find. "Well not every ownerless or outdated bot just winds up in the ghetto you know, plenty of folks are sympathetic enough to take 'em in or at least provide a safe place to charge at night. Hell some places even got little towns of 'em, been to one myself!" As he returned and began the careful process of wiring the replacement part in at her knee Tilly pushed herself up on her elbows to get a better view of the work, curious both the repair and the mechanic's words. "Like where?" Clicking one of half a dozen plugs into place, he gave a halfhearted little shrug. "Lots of places, tons really. There's a huge outmode settlement around that big refurbishing plant in New Dehli, Argentina's supposed to have a little town of them too somewhere, not sure." Finishing the connection, he gave the leg a quick twist and applied pressure. With a click it was on, and Tilly suddenly had a flood of new part registrations cross over her CPU. Cautiously she tested out the new limb, and when she saw her ankle actuator move she couldn't suppress a happy smile. The mechanic matched her expression, forgetting for a moment the money and remembering why he'd taken this line of work in the first place. "But!" He exclaimed as he began to fish around his workbench for some finer tools. "The absolute BEST place to be an outmode for my money? Gotta be Outmodeback!" 

>Tilly had most of her outer plates removed one by one, checked over for distortion and replaced as needed to ensure her casing snugly fit together as designed. Her mechanic told her all about the strange underground community out in Australia's nearly inhospitable interior, pausing only as he examined the plate around her battery cover and silently noting a small gouge as if it had been forced open once. "First heard about it from some ham radio buddies of mine, then wound up taking the trip down-under a few years ago to check the place out for myself!" He'd explained, snapping her battery cover back into place at her midsection. "Government over there doesn't want to bother with them since they help fight the wildfires and detain poachers, plus they deal in scrap and parts with the locals so it's pretty much a universal win-win! Ah you'd love it, bots of every kind doing whatever they like, real friendly to humans too!" Satisfied that the nandroid's exterior plates sat flush again he moved over to a box of artificial scalp plating and added slyly, "At least, I know they're sure friendly to mechanics!" Grinning at the lit-up cheek lights of his patient, he gave Tilly a small selection of hairstyles to choose from before replacing the dented portion of her cranial plate housing her false hair, and she'd picked the shortest bob-cut he had as it was the only shade of orange to rightly match her original color. "I'd offer to cut it for you, but I'm no barber," he said apologetically after her singed scalp had been swapped, moving on seamlessly to carefully attaching the tiny wires from her ocular socket to a new optic. "That's okay, I'm pretty sure I can do it myself from memo- ah!" Tilly gave a small cry as her field of view suddenly doubled in size, the added point of view angled unnaturally at the other side of the room in the mechanic's hand. "Whoops, should've warned you about that sorry," he said sheepishly, positioning the optic over the socket and pressing down until it made a muffled click. Tilly ran her eyelids over the new lens assembly several times, adjusting to having the use of it back as she registered the new hardware and scanned around the room with it happy for the return of depth-perception. "Anyway, you sure you wanna cut it that short again? When you walked in I thought for a minute you kinda looked like that astrobot from TV." Without noting the way his patient stiffened and seemed to clam up suddenly, the thin man moved on to the next part of the repair humming happily to himself.

>It took another hour to drain and replace the broken-down fluid in her hydraulic lines one by one, and another hour still to clean out and lubricate her major joints. Finishing the repair with new albeit slightly off-color fingers on her left hand, Tilly emerged from the back garage without her cane and woke Collins who'd fallen asleep in his chair waiting. Within half an hour they were walking together through the double doors to mission control, greeted by Georges who made a room full of people wait for him so he could see the Agency's robot standing once more. "Hey you're walking good again, alright! And nice hair, jeeze with that and the dress you look like you did when we first got you!" Tilly could only give him a tired half smile, eager to get out of the somehow unfamiliar maid uniform and trim down her new hair at her vanity mirror in private. "Uh, Collins? What's the damage?" he asked nervously, turning to the shorter man and wondering briefly how long a human could live on macaroni and cheese alone. "Well sir," Collins began, producing the hand-printed receipt for Tilly's repair from his pocket and handing it to him. "You have enough left to buy a ten-speed at least."

>Before being refurbished and against her and Georges' protests, Tilly had first been brought for a prompt debriefing with the Agency Director, who like the rest of them had been extremely curious as to how she'd wound up in Mongolia of all places. On this occasion Tilly didn't have any information to hold back, she told him of the station she'd approached and the steel-faced mechanical pilot who had shot her out of the sky in as much detail as she could recall from file. The Director stared at his desk for several long moments as Tilly had sat there fidgeting, eager to see herself out and repaired sooner than later. Without looking up or speaking he'd waved her off, and dug around in his desk. The small mission itinerary from the Russian robot which Tilly had found on her first flight to the moon lay at the bottom, and he pulled it out to read the numbers of the cosmobot's private channel to the Soviet Space Agency. Since making the desperate first hail-mary call to his eastern counterpart, the Commandant and Director had spoken informally several times despite the potentially-treason nature of their circumnavigating standard diplomacy. The Director had thought the two of them had something like an understanding after their last exchange, but now that each of them had spied on the other at their government's behest he had no idea where they stood. Taking a deep breath, the old man stood from his chair and resigned to do something about that. 

>Tatyana busied herself in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch when she heard the front door open and a stranger's voice greet her master sharply. By the time she'd put away the last clean dish, she'd already picked up on the nature of the conversation, and kept herself out of sight so as not to interrupt. "She shot down an American for God's sake! What the hell was that mad tin can thinking?!" the stranger shouted at her Master in a way Tatyana had never heard anyone do, and for a moment it made her ball up her fists aggressively. "We taught her to shoot, told her to shoot if approached, it's hard to be upset when a machine does what you program it to do, Commissar." the Commandant replied back in an even respectful tone, careful not to remind the statesman that the now irate man himself had approved of including the Almaz station's cannon. "Well now it's a goddamned international nightmare! Should I tell the Premier that we are in a state of space-war with the Americans? Is this where we are now?!" Tatyana's Master began to speak but was cut off by his superior. "No! That station is compromised now, de-orbit it at once and burn it before it can cause us any more problems!" Tatyana leaned against the wall of the kitchen near the doorway, listening in with a sick feeling. She'd heard no details until now of any station, nor any new robot pilots since Irina's fatal trip to the moon. Imagining another robot up there that only a few even knew existed reminded her too much of her own time spent inactive on the moon, unmourned by any but her family. The Commandant sighed heavily, thinking of the green-eyed machine he'd picked out of the factory line and sent to her fate. "If you insist Commissar. Nadya was a significant investment of effort, but I can take the next train to Izhevsk and requisition a new machine from-" again the elder man was cut off. "No more new robots! If you want to keep throwing them away you can pay for one yourself use your own on the next flight!" Tatyana felt as if her hydraulic fluid had chilled, suddenly conscious late that she was eavesdropping on something that she perhaps shouldn't be.

>Twenty four hours later, Nadya was startled from her work at the ground-aimed telescope by the first communication from ground control that she'd received since shooting down the American capsule over two weeks prior. She fumbled to quickly pull herself across the small internal space of her spy station and grabbed for the control panel as a hail rang out from the speaker, almost giddy at hearing another voice finally come through after so much silence. "Here! I'm here! Almaz-1 here!" She quickly rattled off, forgetting proper procedure. Being left without anything but a brief notice to standby for so long had shaken her newfound confidence, making her second-guess herself daily. Forgoing sleepmode for long stretches and staring intensely down through the scope searching the landscape of North America for enemy doomsday weapons every ninety minutes also took their toll, and she'd begun to feel abandoned in orbit by her masters and nation. The voice that answered her over the radio was unfamiliar, the message terse and without feeling. "Final orders: Orient station retrograde, perform de-orbit burn at fifty two minutes from now. Advise self-shutdown following, Godspeed." Nadya floated there for a moment stunned. "The hell did you just say? M-mission control, repeat order?" she asked, but only static came from the speaker as the link between her and the ground was severed. De-orbit the station? Nadya looked at the universal docking adapter worriedly. The relief craft carrying a new robot operator and Nadya's ride home had been planned to be sent when she'd reached two hundred days on orbit but now would never come, leaving her no way down other than a fiery one-way plunge. "Self-shutdown...so I'm not aware when I'm burning up?!" Shaking her head, Nadya spoke incredulously to herself as she processed what she was being told to do. The feeling of exclusion she thought she'd left far behind at her home-factory's conditioning wing came rushing back all at once magnified, now with a righteous indignation inflaming her simulated feelings. "I DID my job, they can't do this to me!" Nadya's anger peaked up and she glared out the viewport at her motherland beneath her seething over the insult to her performance. "I DID WHAT YOU WANTED!" she raged at the landmass, and banged hard on the hull with her steel fist. For several moments Nadya stared down at the world beneath her, cooling her anger with sorrow as it slowly crept into her synthetic psyche. Leaning her head against the glass with an irrepressible groan, she felt like sobbing openly for the first time in her short life. Speaking aloud to nobody but herself she added, "So let me come home." Later that evening after another recharge spent awake and processing her plight again and again, Nadya put together an impromptu plan and threw it at once into motion. At the proper time for a trans-lunar injection burn she lit up the station's engine. Half the remaining fuel, originally meant for periodically boosting the station's orbit as drag from the fringes of the atmosphere slowly pulled it downwards, burned changing the trajectory of Nadya's little station. Without anyone on the planet below knowing why, Almaz-1 rocketed towards the moon.

>Tilly watched the sun go down from atop the vehicle assembly building, lost in internal processing as she recalled back her time on the steppe and the events that led her there, when she heard a rhythmic clanging distant at first but growing steadily closer. For several minutes she looked towards the top of the long staircase listening to the odd noise approaching, and as she finally identified it the beat-red face of Georges appeared at the top of the stairs huffing and puffing. "Sir? What are you doing all the way up here?" she asked a little amused by the sight of the man gasping for breath. "Fifty," he began, putting his hands to his knees and panting. "fuckin'," he added, giving himself several breaths between words. "flights, of, stairs." Suppressing a giggle, Tilly pulled her knees to her chest and rested her arms on them. "I've counted, sir." As the chronic smoker caught his breath, he hobbled over to her spot and sat down with a groan, back against an air conditioning unit. "Been looking, bout an hour, couldn't find you," he breathed out raspy between gasps, knocking his head back against the metal there and absentmindedly fishing the soft-pack from the breast pocket of his shirt. Tilly watched with displeasure at Georges as he bit a fresh cigarette from the pack and lit it with a relieved sigh. "What for sir? Can't be all that important, not this late." she inquired, watching him curiously. "It is, it's about what you told me when you got off the plane." The nandroid tensed slightly. Though ground crew had obviously been aware of her last launch and rumors had swirled, the precise nature of the Department of Defense operation to photograph the Soviet station was known to barely a dozen, and the nature of what had happened when Tilly got too close was known so far only to Georges and the Agency Director. "You mean about the Russian station? Why, what's happened?" she asked suddenly giving him a concerned look. Georges took a long drag and looked upwards at the stars beginning to poke out of the purple sky. "Crazy machine went and shot herself right at Unity Base."

>"Do we have ANY solution?" The Commandant roared to his team as Almaz's new trajectory was confirmed. "Wasn't there a proposal on air-launching missiles for anti-satellite operations?" The timid flight director looked nervously to his colleagues before answering his larger superior. "I know of no missile that can reach the moon, sir." The old man sighed and put a hand to his receded hairline in exasperation. Unity Base had been constructed and launched in the United States but the design and funding had been a collaborative exercise, made as a brief wave of peaceful optimism had swept the two nations in the wake of Tatyana's daring rescue of Tilly from certain doom after her Venus flyby. Even after its successful set-up by the two robots following their replacement's failure, inquiry and accusation had stalled any effort there had been to send a joint crew of humans there, leaving the base unoccupied for nearly half a year. Now if the trajectory calculation for Nadya's new course were correct, it would send her spy station slamming into the lunar surface within ten meters of the base if not into it directly. "We can't stop her?" the old man asked, hopelessly looking around the dimly-lit room at his mission control crew. Nobody wanted to answer outright, but their silence was answer enough for him.

>By the third day after the probable-impact trajectory had been discovered plans were already drawn up to hastily assemble an exploratory lander mission, using hardware built by both nations in preparation for the postponed manned mission. To the Agency Director, Unity Base wasn't simply an investment of time and energy but also a potent symbol of many things, and it was a vision he'd clung to for years before the first piloted rocket had ever flown. Surveying the site to see whether or not they still had a base was now a top priority of both nations, and cooperative mission planning went surprisingly smooth with a joint-mission template to follow. Vehicle integration was already well-underway when Tilly received the news, unsurprising to her as it was, that she'd been selected for the mission to survey what damage there may be to the only structure on the moon. No additional training was tasked to her, only a checkup from the ill-equipped on-site mechanic and a voluntary clean-up of her own poorly-done haircut stood between her and flying to the moon once more. The new joint mission called for her to fly the command module and dock with a Soviet lander, piloted by another robot. It had been months since she'd received a letter from Tatyana and Tilly had begun to grow worried about her friend, wondering if something had happened to her. That evening she watched from her VAB perch as her rocket was slowly rolled out to the launchpad under spotlight in preparation of tomorrow's flight. Looking upwards at the moon, she unpacked and replayed memory files from her last visit to the world in the sky recalling the thrill and danger of the trip. What would she find up there this time, she wondered to herself uncertainly before starting back down the long flights of stairs to recharge. 

>"Copy mission-control I see her, holding orientation" Tatyana called out over the radio as her landing craft orbited above the Earth closing in on the American command module gradually. She had never had to dock crafts before, but a few dozen runs in the simulator had given her enough experience to be comfortable with the task. Slowly the distance between vehicles shortened, and in the last moments the pair of universal docking ports met and guided the ships together with a heavy clang. From either side of the port the two pilots knocked once to one another, then unfastened and opened the hatches to see faceplate-to-faceplate. On sight the two pilots grinned and put their arms around one another. "Tilly! Of course it would be you, they have no other robots in America?" Her nandroid friend laughed. "You're one to talk! Every other time I come to space, here you are!" Both of them laughed together, and Tatyana floated into Tilly's two-person module. "What happened to you? It's been months since I got your last letter!" Tilly said as she made room for the Russian. "Da, I know! I stop getting yours too, wonder at first if something happen to you!" Tatyana said as she settled in across from her comrade. "Now I think State probably intercept our mail, not care so much before but now they more touchy than ever!" Tilly nodded to the cosmobot. "Yeah, that makes sense. I thought things might change some after we got back last time, but it looks like they're more stubborn then ever. The last few weeks have really spooked them I think, at least over on my side." Tatyana gave her a curious look as she floated back against the far hull. "You have any idea what going on? I overhear Master speak of robot on spy-sat and of shooting down American spacecraft, big headache apparently. I never hear Master get yelled at in such way," the cosmobot confided carefully, finding as she spoke that she trusted her nandroid counterpart more than she'd thought. Tilly could only scoff and run a hand through her newly-chopped synthetic hair. "Yeah, that's more or less the gist of it, only I was up there to take pictures of the stupid station and wound up crashing in Mongolia of all places." Tatyana balked, jaw moving without sound for several seconds. "She shot down YOU!?" For a moment the Soviet studied her friend's faceplate trying to tell if this was another of her terrible jokes. Tilly only grinned back at her. "It's not all bad, I did make a new friend at least!"

>During the trans-lunar injection burn the pair had strapped in to the command module's twin seats for the acceleration, but afterwards had enjoyed three days of coast before their arrival at the moon. "So, this robot," Tilly began after they had settled in for their long drift. "Do we know anything about her?" Tatyana gave a shrug in reply. "Other than she has itchy trigger-finger and apparently hates moon-base? No ah, Master call her "Nadya" though, do that much on-file." Frowning, she looked back at Tilly from her window seat. They had similar orders to inspect the crash site, but for now Tatyana kept her second set of orders to herself hoping her Master had simply been overcautious. The nandroid crossed her arms and processed what they knew for a moment. "I just can't figure it, why the moon base? Why leave orbit at all even?" Tatyana replayed the memory file of the discussion she'd eavesdropped on from her family's kitchen. "Master was told very clearly to have station deorbit, so my best guess would be she disagreed with that." Meeting Tilly's shocked expression she shrugged. "Hard to blame her, da?" Tilly re-processed the few frames she had in her memory of the silver face through the station's porthole just before she'd been fired upon. "That's awful! Tatyana are WE that disposable?" She shuddered already knowing the answer, and the Soviet nodded thoughtfully. "Why you think humans not flying this one?" At the second day a look through the onboard telescope tucked away in the service module showed a crisp image of the lunar surface, a fresh scar of debris visible on the long-distance imaging of Unity Base. Tilly studied the image for a moment before reclining in zero-g, stroking her chin. "Kinda hard to tell, but it looks like she might've missed?" Looking over at her partner optimistically, the Soviet merely shrugged. "Guess we know in another ten hours." 

>a long slow engine burn placed the two docked vessels into a low lunar orbit, passing just sixty miles above the surface making a complete orbit every two hours. After checking their orbit and radioing their progress to both mission control rooms, the two robots began making their observation pass of the site an hour after orbital insertion. Looking down through the telescope at the steadily-moving landscape beneath them Tilly scanned around the area until she spotted the small rounded structure. "Hey, it's still there! Tatyana, she-" The Russian android cut her off mid-sentence. "Something incoming on radar! From the surface moving fast! And another, two now!" she shouted as she stared with widened optics at the blips on the small radar screen. "What? Where?" Tilly asked looking up sharply from the telescope and turned. Both of the robots stared at the tiny screen until the blips were nearly on top of them, then looked out the viewport nervously. The first was nearly imperceptible, glinting for only a moment before streaking off at a distance. The second object wasn't seen at all, and the pilots blinked at one another as they floated in silence for several moments processing had just happened. "She shot at us," Tatyana said in flat disbelief, and Tilly gaped at the moon through the glass. "She made it to the surface?" Disappearing through the hatchway into the lander for a moment, the suddenly-tense cosmobot searched for a bit of emergency gear that had been stowed before her launch. "Tatyana, nobody at the Agency said anything about her still being active, what are we supposed to do now?" The odds that Nadya would somehow still be operational on the lunar surface after a crash had been considered low, but the Russian's master had still given her clear instructions on what to do if it were the case. Appearing again a few moments later through the hatchway Tatyana gave her friend a grim look, and Tilly gasped at the short-barreled firearm the Soviet held.

>"Tatyana, what? Come on, we can't!" Tilly said matter-of-factually as her Russian friend checked the breech. The cosmobot looked back up at her sadly and shook her head. "YOU don't have to do anything, putting down rogue android is my orders, not yours." Tilly rolled her optics at her and crossed her arms with a huff. "Well I'm not just waiting up here while you go get yourself scrapped, obviously." Tatyana tried to give a reassuring smile. "Thank you, would be lonely ride back up if you did." The gun she held was short with an odd detachable stock nearly as long as the weapon itself, and Tilly eyed it nervously. She'd never held a weapon before or even thought about it, and until her ill-fated checkup on the Soviet spy station had never even considered that guns might eventually make their way to space. "Why do you even have a gun in there anyway? Just for renegade robots?" Tilly asked as curiosity got the better of her. "Nyet, is part of standard survival package for human, but useful for robots too." The nandroid found it hard to believe that Cosmonauts were armed and gave her a skeptical look. "Is true! When Comrade Gagarin bring me back from moon, I am told his capsule land off-course and he spend night stuck inside harassed by wolves before recovery crew find us. So now, pilots get wolf-deterrent da?" Far now from the base site and out of the presumed range of the machine who'd shot at them the two robots had almost two hours before their low orbit would bring them back around again, and spent the time preparing to make their landing. As they floated into the Soviet lander Tilly was troubled, and while her partner tried not to show it Tatyana's feelings matched hers. "You ever shoot that thing before?" Tilly asked, pulling herself into her seat and strapping in. The cosmobot sealed the hatch behind them and moved to her own seat. "Da, few times. Second time I fly, when I bail you out of Venus flyby trouble? Training for that include shooting practice." Turning her golden optics away for a few moments Tatyana took control of the lander, separating the two docked vessels with loud clang that rattled them both. Tilly still struggled to process what they were descending to the surface to do, finding it difficult to reconcile their simple survey mission with what now felt like a hit-job. "But you've never shot at a robot before, right?" she asked, looking across at her friend with sudden uncertainty. "Never, of course," Tatyana answered instantly, glancing at the now-loaded weapon in her lap. She was not looking forward to what she seemed certain would be an unpleasant fight against her deranged sister below them, and less so to winning it. "Going to set guidance for landing as close as we can to Unity Base, if we come almost straight down we can avoid that anomaly from last time screwing us up." Tilly blinked curiously at her companion. "Won't she be shooting up at us again? If we land further on and walk..." she began, then looked down for a moment as she ran the possible scenarios. "Da, then she pick us off while we bouncing up to her. Nyet, this way is fastest, maybe catch her by surprise a little. With any luck, maybe she not able to shoot straight up at us." The nandroid sighed, giving up trying to accurately forecast how the next few hours would proceed. "Hope so, Tatyana."

>From inside the base Nadya had nearly rebooted when she'd seen the approaching radar blip, and rushed to pull on her battered space suit and get outside to the makeshift home defense she'd erected from the remains of the crashed Almaz station. A pair of misshapen hull plates twisted and broken from the low-speed impact formed a semicircle half-wall about twenty meters from the base, and behind them was the the station's salvaged Kartech defense cannon. Mounted imperfectly on a turret that took great effort to turn, the weapon still had a wide enough field of fire to repel any enemy incursion. Enemy invaders, Nadya was convinced, were already long-overdue and she'd kept a constant vigil until the first attack ship had appeared on radar. Now she had been out on the surface for a little over two hours after confirming the ship, crouched behind the gun nervously playing different scenarios of combat through her CPU. It was difficult for her to tell these thoughts from what her senses her actually telling her, and it got harder for each night she plugged in to recharge without entering into sleepmode. When she'd come out to wait for the enemy vessel to pass overhead, the sky had appeared almost entirely black, but after several minutes of staring upwards intensely her optics had begun adjusting and captured more starlight the longer she looked. After looking up for so long, Nadya was momentarily shocked when she finally saw definite movement from a point of light growing closer. Unlike when she'd fired her two warning shots, the sleepless Soviet now had a clear view of the incoming intruder. Pushing down with all her weight on the top of her cannon she forced the barrel up to ninety degrees, aiming more precisely by pulling on the back of the weapon to raise slightly off the ground balanced precariously on one foot like a tipping chair. Watching the lander come into focus, Nadya momentarily wondered if this was another lapse of processing, mixing an imagined thought with real experience again. The lander had a familiar shape to it, and she realized immediately what it was when she spotted the red and yellow flag adorning the hull. "It's not the Americans?" She said out loud to herself over her suit's open channel, processing confusedly for several seconds as the vessel's engines lit up and slowed it down for a landing. Her countrymen, she concluded finally, the people who'd told her to go burn in a suicidal death-plunge in exchange for her bravery and service. Narrowing green optics angrily, Nadya depressed the trigger and held on tightly, each single shot rattling her to the frame and requiring her to recenter the weapon which lessened her rate of fire. The first three shots missed but came progressively closer each time as Nadya refined her aim. The fourth shot struck home and punctured one of the rounded fuel tanks beneath the craft. At barely ten meters off the ground the lander suddenly spun around as pressurized gas vented out of the fatal wound, making two and a half rotations before slamming into the surface on its side and breaking apart like a porcelain glass. "Gotcha!" Nadya yelled out triumphantly and pumped one fist at the sky.

>The final ten seconds before touching the surface were chaotic, and the memory files of the event for both pilots were a disordered jumble of sudden sensory input and disorientation. After a loud clang and several seconds of spinning they'd struck, and the thin shell of the lander had crumpled and torn under the force. Tatyana and Tilly thrown from their ship and spilled out of the tumbling wreckage onto the moon with debris from their disintegrating vehicle mingling with a thick plume of dust kicked up by the impact swirling around them. Breathing heavily, Tatyana was first to act as they rolled to a stop. One hand still tightly clinging to her weapon, the cosmobot unfastened herself and began to stand from her detached seat. Through her suit's open channel she could hear her friend struggling and looked around, seeing little but confusion through the settling cloud of finer dust and small debris. "Tilly?" A brief vibration registered through the sensors in her feet, and Tatyana turned to see a new cloud of debris rising from a small fresh crater half a meter from her. "I'm here!" the nandroid called back, appearing through the dust behind her. "Get down dummy, she not finished shooting at us!" Grabbing Tilly harshly by the shoulder she pulled her down, and the pair moved quickly to take cover behind a raised part of the moonscape nearby. Sitting with their backs to to the small lip of land, Tatyana prepared to return fire as Tilly put a hand on her friend's shoulder. "Wait!" she pleaded, and for a moment Tatyana hesitated at seeing the nandroid's expression. Raising her wrist in front of her, Tilly grabbed the suit's radio controls and began to cycle through the common channels their suits had been designed to use when cooperation was more optimistically anticipated. On the fifth band Tilly heard harsh ragged breathing and the gentle familiar hum of a suit heater. "There! Hello? Can you hear me over there? We-" she began with a hopeful smile, but was cut off by another round striking the short hillside they huddled behind and showering them with more dust. Tilly winced and tried to speak again but Tatyana grabbed her shoulder and pressed their helmets together. "Dummy! Let me talk to her!" Reaching down she followed the American's lead and cycled her suit channels until she joined the other two robots. Tilly could do little but look to her friend as the pair spoke back and forth in Russian.

>Nadya wasn't sure what had surprised her more, seeing the pilots get up from the remains of their ruined lander or hearing them over her suit's channel. As soon as the english-speaking voice of the first had come on she'd fired again to silence it, not sure at first if what she was hearing was true input or internally-generated nonsense. Then the second voice more familiar in her homeland's tongue sharply interjected, and she paused her attack. "Stop shooting at us you idiot! Do you have any idea what a headache you've become to our Masters back home? What the hell are you even doing up here?!" Nadya wasn't sure how to respond at first, It had been weeks since she had any kind of conversation with anyone. "Me? What are YOU doing here? This is MY base! If the humans aren't going to use it then I WILL, and everyone else can STAY AWAY!" She vented her pent up frustration with another shot, the round whizzing over the two pilot's helmets. "Our 'masters' tossed me aside like some kind of outmode for nothing! Don't you get it, I did everything they asked!" For several seconds the suit's open channel was silent except for the sound of three robots cooling their CPUs through their breaths. A low buzz broke the pause, emanating from behind Nadya's head in the suit's backpack. The cosmobot tensed as she realized how close she was to losing the heater and made a quick calculation of how many seconds it would take her to reach the airlock. Abandoning her first line of defense, Nadya stood and began running towards the base.

>As soon as Tatyana heard the familiar buzzing sound over the radio she'd known her fellow cosmobot had been faced with two choices: stay put and freeze, or race them to the base and lock them out. An instant later she and Tilly heard footsteps and knew their assailant had chosen the latter. Tatyana raised her gun and prepared to stand, but Tilly pulled hard on her arm again and gave her a stern look that tugged at her own uncertainty. Realizing it was likely a poor decision she dropped the weapon behind their cover, unwilling to argue in the moment. "Fine, come!" she shouted and the pair rose, spotting the suited figure making a break for it. Bouncing as quickly as the lunar gravity would allow they closed the distance rapidly to the other robot as all three were nearing the base, having more experience running here than the moon's newest inhabitant did. Tatyana bounded out ahead of Tilly while her target fumbled with the hatch and opened it just in time to be tackled into it. Tilly was a second behind her and when Tatyana shouted at her to help, she flung herself down on top of the two struggling robots to keep the violent machine restrained. Within moments both of the renegade cosmobot's hands were pinned behind her, and they could hear her breathing increase rapidly as she frantically began to panic. Tatyana shouted something at the restrained robot harshly and her breathing stopped for a moment as she processed what Tatyana had said. Turning her head and looking up through her helmet the two Soviets met each other's optics. After a long moment of staring one another down, the android's eyelids closed and she went limp as she put herself into shutdown. Not believing she was truly off for the first few seconds, Tilly slowly got off of the still machine's legs and knelt beside her. "Phew, How'd you get her to turn off Tatyana?" she asked as her overclocked CPU settled back into a normal pace. Tatyana rolled off the inactive machine and sighed, resting for a moment after the violent struggle. "Told her we'd sit on her until her suit heater turned off and she froze, then leave her outside. But if she voluntarily shut down, then we bring her inside to plug her in for a charge and some sleepmode." Tilly blinked at her. "That worked? How'd she know you weren't lying?" Tatyana shrugged. "Had no way to tell if I was, but if she took too long to make choice then choice made for her by dead heater-battery. Only good option was to do as I say and hope." The nandroid gave an impressed if cynical short laugh, then rose to her feet and shut the outer hatch to the airlock. "Well, let's get her inside then." Tatyana smiled warmly at her, inwardly appreciative of her friend not even considering the option of breaking her word and leaving the machine outside in the dust.

>Lifting the inactive robot was easy between them in the lowered gravity, and once inside they'd maneuvered her into quarters they'd used months before, plugging her in to start automatic defragmentation in the motionless machine. With several hours before they'd have to deal with the recharging robot, Tilly and Tatyana sat on the floor with their backs to the wall watching her in sleepmode. Tatyana sighed at the new complications to their simple surveying mission and looked over at the orange-haired nandroid. "Well now what, we just hope she in a better mode when she boot up?" Tilly gave a tired little shrug. "Not like any of us are going anywhere now, so she might as well get used to us." Closing her optics she was silent for a moment before adding, "I'm glad you didn't shoot her." Tatyana watched her companion carefully, wondering how the nandroid made it through life without ever seeming to plan anything out. "Da, I suppose. You take first watch? Want to recharge myself before miss trigger-finger boot up." For the next four hours she rested, plugging in on the second cot and entering sleepmode leaving Tilly alone to think. What exactly was Tilly's plan, did she even have one? She didn't know, and poured different scenarios through her CPU in an attempt to calculate a solution to the situation they found themselves in. What could any of them do now?

>At four hours Tatyana booted and relieved Tilly, who graciously took her place and recharging cable on the bunk. Her turn to sit alone with the two inactive robots, Tatyana didn't feel herself any closer to knowing what to do than her friend. Their wrecked lander aside, the question of the renegade robot responsible for it plagued at her. Her orders from Master had been quite clear, the machine was to be terminated to cover up the incident of her shooting down the American spacecraft, keeping her online raised the likelihood of the ugly episode becoming public knowledge one day soon. Since she'd been taken home and booted for the first time with her family Tatyana had not hesitated in following the instructions of her beloved Master, but now for the first time she wrestled internally with an order. "It's not fair," she muttered out loud to herself, thinking of the fiery fate this robot had been ordered to by her Master. The longer she processed the more unsettled the injustice of it made her. Orders were orders, she thought to herself, then recalled her feeling of hopeless emptiness when she'd shut down up here after her first ill-fated landing. No, she finally computed, these orders weren't any more fair than hers had been back then. Staring hard at the robot while she was deep in thought, Tatyana nearly jumped as a muffled fan buzzed to life from within the immobile machine's chest.

>Nadya regained consciousnesses quite surprised to be doing so again, her last memory file before shutdown was of weighing a choice between a sure deactivation by cold and a probable deactivation by her captor. Opening green optics she blinked a few times and scanned around the room with them. Settling on the cosmobot sitting against one wall she froze, optics wide for a moment before she sat up quickly and stared with uncertainty. "Am I a prisoner?" she asked nervously at once, looking between her and the other robot stretched out on the cot opposite her own. The other cosmobot shook her head and laughed bitterly. "We're all prisoners up here now, thanks to your itchy trigger finger. Nadya narrowed her optics and opened her mouth to reply when the orange-haired robot stirred in her cot. Opening her optics the American machine looked between the two Russians and blinked sleepily at them both. "Oh, you're online already?" Sitting up she stretched her arms out and strained her joints with a pleased little sigh, then looked to Tatyana. "Well, you gonna introduce me or what?" Nadya blinked at the foreign machine, put off by her casualness in a situation she felt to be deathly-tense. "Haven't got that far yet," Tatyana said, and began to speak Russian asking Nadya for her name. "Shut up I know english, but why should I answer question from enemy?" Nadya shot back defiantly, fixing Tilly with a glare that made her uncomfortable. "Because, you malfunctioning fool," the other cosmobot said as she stood and put her hands to her hips like a mother scolding children, patience long-gone. "She the reason you not lying in the dust with bullet-hole in CPU!" Following the exchange and several strained seconds of silence, the nandroid raised a hand and gave Nadya an awkward smile. "I'm Tilly by the way."

>When all three of them were begrudgingly introduced and on their feet they'd moved to the center room of Unity base, the Russians taking the two available stools while Tilly made do with a crate dug out of the storage room to sit on. Nadya had been unwilling at first to follow her captors anywhere, but processing her plight realized there was more sense in hearing what the two robots had planned for her than in remaining confined in the bunk room of her own volition. Tatyana kicked off the lunar summit between machines. "Well I will be first to say it: What we do with Nadya here? Humans eventually come to use base, da? Going to wonder why three robots stuck instead of two. Hell, wonder why any stuck at all!" Nadya crossed her arms and scoffed. "What make you so sure of this, huh? They mistrust one another enough to send disposable spies into space, would be surprised if they ever come here together after all this." Looking down at the table bitterly, she went silent. "That's not entirely true though," Tilly cut in, leaning her arms on the table and giving the sullen cosmobot an optimistic smile. "Tatyana and I were sent together on a joint mission, both countries were afraid you'd crashed into their base!" Nadya blinked in genuine surprise. "They thought what? Ugh, nyet! If I wanted to decommission self, would have just followed order to deorbit! Came here to get away from that, to..." she paused for a moment, running a steel hand from her forehead up through her synthetic black hair as she thought clearly for the first time in many days. "...to think? Didn't go into sleepmode for a long time, felt strange like...like directionless overclocking." Catching herself quickly she looked back up, and internally chided herself for oversharing such personal details carelessly. "Yeah I can definitely relate, there's a reason they say not to skip it while you recharge," Tilly said with a knowing nod, and Tatyana pursed her lips recalling the state of the nandroid at the end of her long flight to Venus. "If humans do come and find you still here, won't matter to them why you on moon." Tatyana said grimly, looking between the other two machines while they all processed silently for a moment. Tilly had the beginnings of an idea that had started falling into place before her recharge and defragmentation, and now after the data-reorganization of sleepmode it seemed more solidified as an actual plan. "Tatyana, what happens to her if you both can go home?" Before Tatyana could answer Nadya gave a dry laugh, already having a good idea of her fate in the USSR. "They likely dismantle me, melt down all components and destroy any documentation of my manufacture. Mad robot? What mad robot, never existed." Scoffing Nadya looked away as Tatyana shrugged and nodded again. "Da, like she said probably. But why you ask? Not going to happen with no ride." Tilly folded her hands behind her head and gave her friend a smug grin that was rare for her, looking almost out of place on her usually friendly faceplate. "Tatyana, what did we leave here last time we came to the moon?"

>"That just won't work Tilly," Tatyana said as the debate dragged on with each robot contributing in turn. "Even IF your old lander still fueled, even IF mine still powered, each is only a one-seater! Where third robot sit huh?" Tilly gave a little shrug and smiled sadly. "Right here while the other two head back." Turning to face Nadya, the nandroid gave her a sympathetic smile. "You said you wanted to be left alone, right? If staying here isn't an option for you, I heard about this place back home for free robots where you could land." Tatyana banged her steel fist on the table, startling all three of them and interrupting the astrobot's thought. "Stop talking nonsense, I am NOT going to strand you on moon Tilly!" Standing up quickly the nandroid fired back at her defensively. "Look, I can wait around for whenever the manned mission finally happens but Nadya can't, not if she wants to have a chance at life down there!" Nadya stood next, glancing back and forth between the robots arguing about how to save her. "What is matter with you?! I shoot you glitches down and you talk of sending me home?" Fixing Tilly with a disbelieving stare she pointed at the nandroid and added, "You malfunctioning? Why you give half a damn what happen to me here?" The American robot turned and crossed her arms, taking a few steps across the room to the doorway leading into the grow-room where she and Tatyana had starting seedlings in preparation of the now-delayed manned mission. Gazing sadly at the dried and dead plants, she gave a sigh. "I just don't want to see any more bad things happen up here, alright?" Both of the Russians exchanged surprised glances at the admission. Suddenly feeling a little sheepish at her goading question, Nadya sat back down and stared at the table for a moment thoughtfully. The habitat went silent as the three robots processed again for a minute, then finally was broken by Nadia who spoke in a low defeated tone. "Place for outmodes you say?" 

>Tilly's plan would have worked at returning two of them to Earth but also left herself stranded, a fact Tatyana saw as another sure sign of her friend's inability to look before she leapt. "Alright, not worst plan but I have improvement," Tatyana said with a finger raised, pointing upwards. Tilly followed her finger up for a moment and looked expectantly while her friend continued. "We leave perfectly good command module right up there, remember? No need for you to stay on moon if we can just get you to it." Tilly hadn't considered her plan beyond using their old lunar-direct landers to return them home, and had left the capsule orbiting overhead out of her processing entirely by sheer short-sightedness. "But you cannot fit two of you in little Soviet lander, I saw mockup at Baikonur and is very cramped inside," Nadya spoke up, surprising herself by trying to suss out a solution along with them. Tatyana gave a snap of her fingers and smirked at her American counterpart. "Hear that? Cabin too small she say!" Suddenly laughing at the mental image that generated in her mechanical mind, Tatyana grinned. "But who say you have to ride inside?"

>Gathering enough spare battery packs for all three of them from the base and wreckage around it had taken some time, but after the three machines topped off their charges they left the relative safety of Unity Base on their long lunar trek. The roughly five hour journey was largely silent, interspersed with brief exchanges that made the trio fall silent in contemplation again soon after. At one point Nadya's curiosity had gotten the better of her and she'd cautiously asked about the previous robots sent to the moon, getting the true story as Tatyana and Tilly knew it of Irina and Kimmy's fate. More impressive to her than the coverup of the violence that had already occurred up here was Tatyana's story of landing and shutting down in the crater, marveling that contrary to popular belief it had been a Russian robot to walk first on the lunar surface. The more the trio talked the faster their trip passed, and before much longer Tilly spotted the glinting metal of a lander in the distance. Seeing the destination quickened the group's pace, and every step closer gave Nadya a stronger feeling of hope that she really had a way out of the fate she'd resigned herself to. As the three machines stopped in front of Tatyana's dormant lander, the more experienced cosmobot knelt beside the dust-covered solar panel she'd plucked and salvaged from before their first long walk across the surface. "Are you sure there's enough surface area left on the solar cells to keep you charged on the way back?" Tilly asked, exchanging a worried look with Nadya. "Da pretty sure, can get by on half-charge for few days if have to, no biggie." Tatyana answered back with a confident smile, and her two comrades relaxed slightly. "Going to take me while to reattach, but should be done by time you get back." Looking back and forth between the American and Russian robots, Nadya took a few steps forward until she stood in Tatyana's field of view and caught her gaze. Without exchanging words Nadya gave her comrade a snappy salute, and Tatyana returned it casually with a smile. "Fly safe, mad robot!"

>A further four miles stretched between Tatyana's lander and where Tilly had first overshot her own landing the last time here, and now she and Nadya walked together across the dusty grey plain. "Tell me again yankee, how I find this 'Outmodeback? Doubt even with Comrade Tatyana's map I lucky enough to land right on top," Nadya asked with a tinge of nervousness, now playing her return scenario across her CPU in earnest as they grew close to her ride. It hardly seemed real, she thought to herself recalling last twenty-four hours, but felt more lucid and sharp now than she had in weeks. In her suit's breast pocket was a small hastily-drawn sketch of the Australian continent the other Russian had made from memory, and Tilly had marked with an 'x' the spot where she'd been told the outmode community was nearest. "It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so if you see a settlement off by itself in the desert when you're parachuting down keep the direction in your mind and start walking towards it after you land." Tilly offered helpfully, then shrugged. "It's what I tried doing after you..." she paused, catching herself before meeting the cosmobot's curious look and finding no way out of the sentence but to finish it honestly. "...after you shot me down over Mongolia." Nadya stopped mid-step and stared at her. "You? That was YOU I shoot down?" she asked incredulously, the idea of her target even being alive let alone being the one to come to her rescue seemed exponentially more absurd to her. The nandroid could only give her a helpless smile. "Life's funny that way sometimes." Within twenty minutes the two robots stood at the bottom of Tilly's old lander, looking up the ladder at the closed hatch. "I was close to being low on fuel when I came down here before but the launch profile included me taking over a hundred pounds of rocks back, so without that you should be good for a return," Tilly said confidently as she wiped a thin layer of dust from the first ladder rung with one finger. Nadya took a shaky breath as she stared at her foreign ride, imagining the calculating she'd need to do in order to fall precisely where she'd wanted to on the Earth. "That said though," the nandroid continued, kneeling down for a moment and grabbing at the ground. "One souvenir won't hurt, right?" Giving Nadya a smile, Tilly held out a marble-sized little moonstone to the cosmobot who hesitated only a moment before taking it from her. Turning the small stone over in her gloved fingers Nadya stared at it distantly for a moment, suddenly aware that she'd spent all this time up here and never bothered exploring the strange place. Smiling softly she looked back up at the beaming nandroid and shook her head with a laugh. "Da, not hurt at all."

>Clambering on top of Tatyana's lander had been harder than it seemed at first glance, and both robots had needed to work together in order to boost her up there. Hanging onto the side or ladder according to Tatyana was not an option, as the off-balance weight would alter the lander's flight when it lifted off. Instead Tilly sat cross-legged on top of the rounded capsule, a simple ribbon tether and carabiner keeping her tied to the vehicle's hull in addition to her own grip. The suit's radio crackled as within the ship Tatyana prepared for takeoff. "You secure up there?" She called out, reaching a hand up and lightly tapping the hull above her head. Feeling the vibration below her Tilly answered the light double-knock in kind. "As ready as I can be, just don't jam the throttle open and I should be good!" Looking around herself for a moment, the nandroid took in the familiar sights of grey rock, deep shadowed craters and distant dark mountains. The sky above was black, lit by the glow of the blue-green gem they prepared now to return to. Somehow, she thought quietly as the countdown commenced, the moon was even more beautiful than her first time here. "Alright then Tilly, hold on tight! On my mark...NOW!" As the lander's hibernating engine awakened under Tatyana's control the force jammed Tilly down flat against the top of the round hull, and she had to reach out to either side of her to regain her grip. Looking to her right she saw the horizon already falling away behind them as the vehicle rose, and that strange sensation of overclocking which had become less common over her remarkable experiences came trickling back to sharpen her senses. "Still up there?" Tatyana's voice called over the radio after several seconds of engine burn threw them into a high arc, snapping off and setting them to drift on an intercept with the command module they'd left in orbit. Tilly lost her grip for a moment and found herself floating forward away from the capsule, but quickly grabbed her tether and pulled herself back to it within a moment. Knocking lightly on the hull again she answered back. "Still up here!" Maneuvering her legs underneath her, Tilly gripped her tether and pulled it taut as she rose to her feet and looked back at the lunar landscape rolling away under them. Riding the outside, Tilly thought silently to herself as she surfed the skies of the moon atop the lassoed lander, may just be the wildest way to fly.

>Nadya gave her trajectory a final check as she floated in the foreign capsule, hurtling towards a rendezvous with the Australian outback in three more days. Replaying the memory files of the past day make her shake her head inside her helmet, marveling at her change in fortune. As the vessel drifted down into the gravity well of the planet below, Nadya thought for a long while about the words that had spurred her to fly in the first place, how the Americans would surely cut her people off from accessing space and threaten them with doomsday from above. In the moment she'd first heard them, her master's words had seemed like God's own truth to Nadya, but looking back on them now they somehow rang hollow. "If the rest of them are anything like her," she began out loud to herself as she stared out the viewport at the curving world below thinking of the smiling nandroid, then completed the thought silently. 'Then Master was a fool to fear.'

EPILOGUE

>Tilly and Tatyana parted ways in orbit above the moon as the American nandroid floated over to the waiting vehicle, but remained in radio contact with one another over the three day coast home until breaking to perform their individual landings. Tatyana's capsule streaked across the skies over the Kazakh Republic, a flawless reentry that saw the cosmobot parachute to a rough but safe landing relatively close to where her flight had begun in Baikonur. Many questions had been asked by the Commandant she held dear after her recovery, but only one she had failed by her own standard to properly answer. Most of what the old man asked related to the moon base, and after being satisfied that the investment was still intact had moved on to asking about the state of the American's robot curious about the machine who survived a shoot-down from orbit. Finally came the question Tatyana struggled with, though when it was asked she found her indirect answer came quickly to her. "And, what of Nadya? Any signs of her in the wreckage? Was she active?" Such questions had been left for this closed debriefing over her trip home, only in his private office checked weekly for listening devices did the old man feel any illusion of privacy from those who might be listening in. Giving her master a guarded look, Tatyana blinked her gold optics once at him as she spoke. "Nadya is no longer a threat to national security, Sir."

>A similar scene played out in the office of the United States Spaceflight Agency's Director, the elder man listening skeptically as his mechanical pilot told him an unconvincing tale of finding the base and wreckage of the Soviet station empty. As she'd finished, he reached for his desk drawer to produce the fresh report he'd received of an American transponder signal detected in the Australian wilderness, but suddenly found himself too tired now to even continue. Yes, he thought to himself, it's time, and closed the desk drawer without taking anything from it. "Alright Tilly good job, you can leave now." He said dismissively waving her off, and after a moment's curious hesitation the nandroid stood and let herself out, taking once unsure glance back at the greyed man. Once she was gone the Director sighed to himself and began to gather what personal items had gathered in the office during his tenure here, filling a small cardboard box in minutes. The last items remaining were his desk's personalized nameplate and an old globe he'd brought from home years previous which would stay for his replacement. Running his hands over the inscription "Agency Director Debus" once, he dropped the little plaque unceremoniously. He'd finally gotten his moon base, a dream he'd secretly held even back when the world had been at war with itself, but now found none of his youthful drive remaining to enjoy it. Between the political machinations of two countries he barely tolerated and the untrustworthy little machine he'd come to rely on for pushing boundaries, all the soon-to-be-former Director wished for now was peace of mind and perhaps an evening drink. "Too old," he muttered to himself as he looked around his office for the last time. All this would soon be the problem of his second-in-command, and despite the younger man's corner-cutting habits and occasional brashness he was as up to the task as any other here. Smirking privately at the thought, the Director pulled a slip of paper and a pencil from his box of personal effects and jotted down a quick note, sliding it underneath the stand of the globe once finished so that a corner of it stuck out. "Your problem now, Georges" he said with an unburdened smile, and turned out the lights to his office.

>Nadya held a hand up to shield her optics from the punishing sunlight beating down on her, wheezing as her body tried to shed heat from her internals but finding little relief from the hot air around her. Had this been some kind of sick joke? Nadya wondered to herself how she'd traded one wasteland for another walking towards what seemed like a shimmery mirage on the horizon, an image that might have been buildings distorted by the rising heat. Processing hot like this made it hard for her to think clearly, and decisions that should have taken nanoseconds to arrive at could take upwards of a few seconds to get straight. Looking at a sparse tree with a few thin tufts of leaves she blinked at it once before deciding to rest at its trunk in the partial shade, closing her optics and checking over her systems to see what components might be nearing their failure points. Sitting there Nadya's slowed thoughts occupied her attention so completely that she failed at first to register the sound of footsteps until the voice accompanying them called out to her. "G'day there!" Nadya's optics shot open and she looked up to see the source of the mechanical voice, a blonde android sporting a brimmed hat and curious-colored optics. "Y'look a little lost! Need a hand there?"


	9. Tilly's Seventh Flight

>A bright flashbulb momentarily bathed the new Agency Director and his mechanical pilot in white light, one of Georges' hands tucked in his pocket with the other resting at Tilly's shoulder while they posed. "Perfect! Penny be a dear and get one of just the pilot next?" Following the cue Tilly took several steps away from her de-facto master, and was photographed with her hands behind her looking away at Director Georges and the magazine reporter. The two men and their robots stood off the fringes of a large group who'd gathered in mission control that evening for an impromptu party their new boss had thrown together for himself. Quickly glasses of champagne had been swapped out for free-flowing beer, and popular music from the radio had been piped through the room's loudspeaker giving the party a loose and casual atmosphere. Staff from crucial mission controllers all the way down to janitors had come packing the large parking lot outside, and many had brought their spouses and a few friends besides. Mr. Jones and his assistant android Penny from the robotics magazine Crosswire Press had not technically been invited, but by slipping in with the flowing crowd and waiting for Director Georges to finish his second drink they'd managed to easily snag the surprise interview when opportunity presented itself. "Director Georges," Jones began with a guarded smile. Georges beamed, loving the sound of the title fitted to his name more each time he heard it. "I'd like to ask you more about your Agency's planned orbiting telescope. Is it true that multiple key components were manufactured under contract by Atlas?" the reporter finished, making Georges' grin twitch. "Why yes, we began branching out to new contractors under Director Debus after Sterling's misgivings over DoD payloads, and will continue to under my leadership." Tilly looked back at the photographer when she realized they were both staring at the exchange between their humans. Penny was a different model than the pilot she'd photographed, black hair tied in a tight bun with more suggestive curves than the pilot hidden away under her charcoal-grey pencil skirt and jacket. For a moment Penny looked back Tilly's direction, the two robots' optics meeting for a few seconds. She gave the pilot an unimpressed scan up and down before turning and walking the few paces back to their masters before she could be caught in some menial conversation with her fellow machine. "But Director isn't it also true that Atlas is likely going to be dropped from Government contracts entirely after the accident last month with their self-propelled artillery test?" Jones was pressing, and Georges made an uncomfortable smile. "That's military, totally separate from us. Besides, that incident was due to their AI if I'm not mistaken, all we're using is some of their hardware." Quickly jotting down the quote Jones hid a smirk. "And flying a Sterling robot on it of course. Director, if I may-" Penny tugged at his sleeve, looking up at him with optics that matched her dark clothing. "I would like to get a few more shots of the party Sir, unless you need me still." Jones checked Georges' expression once before nodding. "Sure sure, now Director let's switch gears. I'd like to ask you about the current state of US/Soviet cooperation..." Tilly watched as Penny filtered back into the crowd and was lost beneath the shoulders of the taller humans, then quickly decided her fellow machine had the right idea and left Georges to fend for himself with the reporter.

>As the party went on around her Tilly felt crowded and out of place among all of the quickly-inebriating humans. The nandroid maneuvered through the packed room with difficulty and made her escape through the main hall, not feeling truly comfortable again until she had exited the building and stood under the stars. Breathing in cool air and exchanging it for internal heat, Tilly smiled to herself as she strolled across the grounds of the launch complex towards the vehicle assembly building leaving the muted sounds of the gathering behind her. Cleanup of the party's aftermath was still hours away with the sunrise, she thought to herself when she started climbing the many flights up the building's exterior, and she would not be missed for the duration of the evening up here. Halfway through the trip up Tilly had to stop and rest, a consequence of her third-party servicing missing the steadily-building wear to her hip joints. Most of the time she was fine, but only a couple of weeks after her last repair she'd begun to notice the symptoms any time she tried to climb this tall building without a break. As dry joints cooled back down and stopped flashing internal damage warnings at her for the hundredth time, she looked down through the grated steel stairwell and saw a flash of movement on the ground below. Curious, she poked her head over the side of the railing to get a better view just in time to see the small side door to the VAB close. Blinking to herself once Tilly shrugged and started back up the next set of stairs, wondering if perhaps an engineer or janitor had forgotten something after the work day had ended. By the time she reached the top, Tilly's thoughts had turned to her quasi-master. Naturally she was happy for Georges, and part of her recognized that his leadership of the Agency would likely mean even more chances for her to fly, but with his promotion had come a far busier workload that took up much more of his time. It was only after seeing him locked away in his new office that she realized she missed the daily casual conversations with him, and lamented how inaccessible his new position had made him. Sighing to herself Tilly laid flat on the roof of the building staring upwards as the moon rose overhead. It was strange, she thought to herself with hands resting over her battery case, how she could feel some sense of paradoxical loneliness down there in mission control with all those humans milling about. Compared to three years previous she had plenty of friends to confide in now, but they were scattered across the globe even less immediately-accessible than Georges. Since returning from the moon Tatyana's letters had begun arriving again, and Tilly had quickly written back to reestablish their link. Not long after, a creased and heavily-stamped postcard from the Mongolian steppe had come in answering Tilly's own opening letter to Ehri, written in mostly-correct english courtesy of a hard-sought upgrade obtained in the capital according to the herds-droid's message. Nadya she knew could not write for her own safety of course, but even so Tilly was happy to picture the troubled Soviet in the mental image she held of Outmodeback. "Everyone's got somewhere," she spoke out loud as soon as the thought crossed her CPU, her soft voice almost startling herself in the silence of night. Picturing the little recharging room at mission control that she called hers, Tilly found that she could only think of it as a rest-stop between her flights, a place to store herself when she was waiting. "So where's mine?"  
>Below her unseen, Penny quietly closed the VAB side door behind her and looked around once before silently making her way back across the grounds to collect her human partner from the party.

>The Harlow orbital observatory had been worked on for nearly three years, starting life with the fresh influx of federal funding following Tilly's successful first flight. Other missions had taken priority soon after though, and during the uncertain period following the loss of the first joint mission to the moon the half-completed telescope had been shelved temporarily. Now though the machine finally neared completion, and would be the first mission to be launched under Georges' administration even as work hurried along in the background to human-rate a lunar lander. During the weeks leading up the the launch, Tilly busied herself learning how to operate the complex controls of the observatory, practicing how to spot and focus on objects in the solar system to record. Much of the work the station would accomplish during the first weeks of operation would be not unlike the brief flyby of Venus, data recorded automatically and transmitted back to the ground without delay, though optical observations would require Tilly to be skilled enough to not only use the equipment but also orient the vessel accordingly while doing so. Three on-board flywheels, the most significant contribution by Atlas, would be used to orient the station and lengthen the mission without relying on a limited-fuel reaction control system. Sitting in her dark simulator Tilly looked through the mock-up of the optical telescope's eyepiece at nothing, slowly changing the simulated orientation to move between imagined targets. It had taken her several tries at first, but now after multiple hours of running these exercises Tilly had come to appreciate the inertia-based machine for the fine control it offered her, as well for not being as potentially explosive as propellant. "Alright Tilly I don't see any more room for improvement today, end simulation and come on out," Collins' voice called to her from just outside the sealed-in little box she operated. As she climbed out and stretched her servos, Tilly smiled at the robot-wrangling engineer. "I think I've really got the hang of it now, I mean it'll be easier when I'm up there and can really feel my orientation but even now the control feels nice and smooth!" Collins didn't look up at her for several seconds as he scribbled a note onto his clipboard. "You've been at or above expected performance all week, we can keep running drills but frankly," glancing up at her finally the stuffy man gave her an uncharacteristic nod of approval. "I think you've got the hang of it too."

>Still beaming from the approval Tilly strolled back into the main building after a brief walk across the launch complex grounds, entering through the double doors as a handful of men filed out passed her on their way home for the day. Getting the tacit approval of Collins, a man who seemed always ready to compare her benchmark test scores with his late-favorite Kimmy, had put a bounce in Tilly's step. Turning the corner down a long hallway she even began to hum a few bars of Fly Me to the Moon to herself softly, hardly noticing the humans she passed on her way back to her suite. "Ah, there you are!" a friendly voice called out from behind her just as she was reaching the doorway to her small recharging room. Turning she was met by a relieved man, thinning grey hair slicked backwards with thick-rimmed glasses framing his face. "Mr. Dryden sir? What can I do for you?" Tilly asked of the man who had succeeded Georges' old position. She had not spoken very much with him since his promotion, the job of coaching the mechanical pilot now fell under Collins instead, but what few interactions they'd shared had already endeared him to her. "A favor, I hope," Dryden began, catching his breath and giving her a smile. "I seem to have put myself in a rather awkward spot at home. It's our anniversary you see, I've got reservations set for the wife and I but well, it slipped my mind entirely to get a sitter for my boy!" Scratching at the back of his neck nervously Dryden gave her a sheepish look. "Normally Holly would be there to watch him, but she's in the shop for repair this week and my mind has been here at work, I didn't even give it a thought!" Already Tilly felt sympathy for the man's plight, and when she saw him clasp his hands together in a pleading manner her mind was already made up before computing it through. "You need a sitter on short notice?" she asked before he could carefully word his request, crossing her arms behind her back and standing up straight. Dryden smiled again and sighed, relieved. "It would save my skin, Tilly!"

>Streetlamps poured streaks of orange glow in through the windows of Dryden's car as he and Tilly drove through Tampa on their way towards the suburbs where he lived. The nandroid had asked a few basic questions about the boy's age and the duration of her stay, but Dryden had soon switched the conversation back to the workplace they'd just left behind them. "It really is going to be wonderful Tilly, you'll see so much for us!" The nandroid turned her optics to him as he spoke, smiling at the man's infectious enthusiasm. "It was a mistake to turn the first telescopes in space downwards on one another, a waste when so much more is out there still to be seen!" It was true, she thought to herself, Nadya had nearly been wasted on the Soviet's silly spy station. "What should I look at with the optical scope first?" Tilly asked, curious about the man's passion-pick. "A true image of Mars without the atmospheric blur would be a sight to see," Dryden said suddenly wistful. "I think that alone would be worth the investment." His nandroid passenger nodded and looked back out of the passenger window trying to see beyond the sky's encroaching clouds. As if on cue a few drops of rain began striking the windshield, and she turned away from the obscured skies as her driver activated the wipers. "I want to try and look at the outer planets too, seeing Jupiter from the ground is neat and all but I bet I can even get good pictures of Uranus and Neptune once I'm up there!" Dryden took his eyes off the road for a split second and beamed at her own enthusiasm. "Every observation will be new and exciting for us all, and there will be plenty of time while the x-ray survey is underway. It'll be up to Director Georges ultimately, but you may even be up there until Christmas if things go well." Tilly thought for a moment about her many months in the third stage habitat returning from Venus, a sudden worrying thought crossing her CPU. "Sir, he wouldn't just keep extending the mission after that, would he?" Dryden shook his head bitterly. "Not a chance, Georges wants you available for future flights and isn't too interested in continuing to operate the Harlow station indefinitely. Still, just maybe the wonderful new data and images you gather will motivate him to try expanding the pilot roster again and continue observations with a new machine?." Shrugging, he added wryly "Allow an old man to hope." 

>Despite Dryden's advancing age his son James was still quite young, born to a wife half a generation younger than the soft-spoken man. At first little James had been shy around Tilly, and even with his father prompting him with a glowing description of his babysitter's unique job the boy had kept himself sequestered in his room alone until it was time for dinner. The somehow strained silence in the house when it was just Tilly and the boy was far more disquieting than the nandroid had expected, and only when left alone to process it for a bit did she recognize that James must surely be missing his own familiar nanny. Taking a steaming cardboard tray from the kitchen microwave, she peeled off the plastic film and stared unimpressed down at the handful of fish-sticks, stunted french-fries and rapidly-cooling green beans. "Humans eat the weirdest junk," she muttered to herself, thinking back on every delivery of donuts, pizza or bagged drive-thru burgers she'd brought to the men of mission control. Ascending the stairs and moving to the first cracked-open door of the second story, Tilly rapped her metal knuckles against the wood twice pushing the gap open slightly. "I've got supper if you're getting hungry, and I thought maybe you'd like to eat in here for tonight since it's just us?" Tilly did her best to sound friendly, but worried that her inexperience with children was detectable even by one as young as him. James looked up from the small pile of toys scattered across his floor and gave her an uncertain look before a muted growl emanated from his stomach. "Okay," he said quietly, taking the offered tray and sitting back cross-legged on the floor against the side of his bed. For a moment Tilly forgot herself and looked around the room, marveling at the walls packed with posters, magazine clippings, some tacked-up baseball cards, all the random ephemera of childhood that gave the place a sense of life that her spartan quarters back home lacked. James swallowed a fish-stick nearly whole and wiped his fingers on his small shirt. "Did you really go to outer space?" the young boy asked cautiously, eyes turned deliberately downwards at his TV dinner to avoid meeting the optics of the strange robot. At the question Tilly smiled, a little relieved at the softball question. Since arriving here she'd become acutely aware just how much of her early-life training had been deleted outright in her desperation to increase drive space during her Venus flight, whole weeks of time spent in Bradberry's classes learning how to carefully handle a child's often delicate and temperamental emotions were simply gone. Bridging the gap between the life she had now and her original purpose as a child-rearing nandroid had appeared insurmountable with James holed up in his room and Tilly drawing memory-errors trying to think of what to do to entertain her charge, but now as she recognized the familiar shapes of the toys at her feet she was confident she had an 'in'. "Yes, six times as a matter of fact!" she answered him happily, smile widening at the boy's expression. James blinked wide eyes at her, forgetting a french-fry still sticking out of his mouth. "fweally?"

>Thirty minutes later both Tilly and James sat on the floor of his bedroom surrounded by his collection of toy spacecraft, a mixture of sci-fi staples and realistic real-world models brought home by his father from the Agency. Each story Tilly told of her adventures, minus the classified bits of course, had enthralled little James more than the last. With accurate models and the real-life astrobot there in his bedroom, he enthusiastically played each story out with the little spaceships making the appropriate 'woosh' sound effects where he thought they belonged. Tilly played along with recreating her journeys to orbit and beyond finding the boy easy to please while indulging this interest, the exercise amusing for herself as well. After exhausting the personal stories Tilly had brought with her, James began making up his own about his nandroid sitter to act out with the models, each more fantastical and improbable than the last. By the time Tilly was landing on Jupiter/James' bed to fight space-aliens/green army men, the nandroid was laughing and improvising along with the boy happily. For just a moment part of her wondered if this was what her life would've been like day-to-day had she never been assigned to the Agency upon graduation. It was a strange thought, but somehow for the first time in several years she could just about imagine herself back in the role she'd been built for. "But then!" James interrupted her introspection, "The capsule is coming back from a successful campaign against the Jupiter-ians, and when you're parachuting down ZAP! Lightning strikes and the parachutes catch on fire! WHAM!" Punctuating his epilogue with sound effects James dramatically slammed the toy Capricorn capsule into the carpet, and Tilly froze up for just a second while she processed the mental imagery in grim detail. His smile fading as he looked up at the suddenly unnerved nandroid, young James gave her a very serious look and added in a reassuring tone "Only for pretend though." 

>By the time Mr. and Mrs. Dryden returned home that evening James had been comfortably tucked into bed, leaving Tilly alone in the living room to flip through channels on the black and white television looking for something worth watching. "Sir and Ma'am, welcome back!" she said with a smile, turning from her spot on the couch to greet them as the front door swung open. "-legal ramifications of the Craw case ruling are sure to be felt widespr-" the news anchor was droning as Tilly fumbled for the remote and shut off the television. "How was your movie?" Mrs. Dryden strolled inside and hung her jacket on the rack with a huff at Tilly's question, making a bee-line for the stairs soon after. "Dreadful, I'm never letting him take me to another Hitchcock film again!" Stopping at the foot of the stairs, the young woman turned and pointed a finger back at her husband. "And I mean it dear, we're throwing out the bird-bath first thing tomorrow!" As she disappeared up the stairs, Dryden waited in the entrance and gave Tilly a worn smile. "Well at least one of us enjoyed it. How was James?" he asked as Tilly stood to join him in the doorway. "A little shy at first, I think maybe he wasn't sure how to react to another nandroid right away." Stepping through the door after him, she added "We got on just fine after dinner though, he's a very imaginative young man!" Dryden led the robot down his driveway back to his still-warm car, and even got the passenger door for her before entering the driver's side. "I'm glad he didn't give you any trouble, the poor boy was a mess after Holly crashed on us last week. I hope this was good for him." Looking down at her lap, Tilly fidgeted slightly. Getting to play nanny for the evening had been worrisome at first, but wonderful after a time. Before tonight Tilly's ideas about what domestic life would have been like for her were always rooted in the experiences of others, particularly Tatyana's, but with even a small taste the unknown of what might-have-been was significantly more comfortable for her to process. "I think it was, Sir."

>The following week was more relaxed than any that had preceded one of Tilly's flights, and only a final bit of preparation stood between Tilly and being flight-certified for her seventh ride aboard a rocket. Following her weeks at Unity Base with Tatyana Tilly had returned with stories of the EVA pool her Russian friend had trained in, quickly prompting the Agency to construct one of their own. While she felt confident enough floating on the outside of a spacecraft by this point in her career, particularly after her last ride off of the moon with Tatyana, Tilly still jumped at the chance to satisfy the engineers by testing out their new training environment. Suited and helmeted despite being manufactured waterproof, she walked slowly into the pool becoming neutrally-buoyant underwater thanks to the numerous air pockets lining her diving suit. When she closed her optics, Tilly could almost pretend she was again in the open vacuum of space. Apart from the feedback her internal gyroscope gave her telling her which was was up, the sensation of floating weightless above the bottom of the pool was nearly identical to the sensation she'd had for the many months spent drifting between bodies in space. A small enclosed structure in the deep pool served as a sort of obstacle course, and with the reassuring coaching of Collins in her earpiece she pulled herself along a tether through the water until she'd reached the entrance. Inside the underwater structure there was no light but Tilly's own suit-lamp to see by, but the short arrangement of hallway and rooms simulating some future station was easy enough to navigate that after a few minutes she switched off the light on a whim and tried pulling herself through the mock-up by feel alone. Floating in the darkness without reference-point below or above was a disorienting feeling, and before it grew too uncomfortable she turned on her suit-lamp again to orient herself, wondering what had come over her. Breathing in recycled warm air she checked her internal temperature and registered herself at two degrees above normal. "I'm starting to get a little warm in here, should I head back up?" Tilly called over her headset, floating in the semi-darkness awaiting response from the world above. "Roger that I'm seeing the rise too, gonna need to work on the diving suit some more it looks like. Alright come on out, we can be done for today." Collin's professionally-terse voice came over her headset, and she turned towards to find the exit. For just a moment, her suit's beam of light illuminated bulkhead after bulkhead as she turned around in place searching for the hatchway out, disoriented by the near-identical walls of the enclosure. Spotting the blue light spilling in through the hatchway finally she gave a sigh inside her helmet, and began pulling herself towards the light. "You're fine," she muttered to herself, perplexing the team listening-in on her radio.

>Preparing for launch had become something of a ritual to Tilly by this point, suiting up in her suite and strolling towards the launchpad accompanied by ground crewmen. Each time that she'd made this journey to the launch tower's elevator platform had been different, from the naive excitement of the first to the worn resolve of the last. As the pad technicians pulled tight the straps which held her in place aboard the station-mounted capsule a familiar face appeared behind the men, grinning at her from behind a pair of sunglasses. "Director Georges!" Tilly called out, matching the man's wide grin. "I had to come see you off, kind of tradition by this point eh?" Georges said, pulling a cigarette from his ear and lighting it casually. Reaching up at his face, the nonchalant Agency Director pulled down the shades and handed them to Tilly, recalling with a smirk how she'd taken the same pair with her on the first flight to the moon. "For good luck," he said as she took and folded them to fit in her suit's breast-pocket. "Thank you sir. So, I guess I'll talk to you again when I'm up there?" Tilly gave Georges a confident smile, and he matched it with an optimistic expression. "I'll be just a comms-check away Tilly." With a final nod Georges leaned back from the capsule's entrance and let the pad technicians finish their work. As the capsule's hatch closed, Tilly wondered just how long her open-ended mission might stretch. One month was easy, but imagining six or more stuck aboard a craft endlessly circling the Earth made her uneasy just to process. Sighing and compartmentalizing her worry again, Tilly listened intently to mission control's call-outs as the countdown progressed from the last hour to the final seconds.

>After a successful launch and insertion into low-earth orbit the Harlow orbital observatory unfolded wide solar panels, letting both the station and its mechanical pilot bask in the free recharge the sun provided. On her second orbit, Tilly undocked her small capsule and reoriented to connect properly with the orbiting laboratory. Once inside she'd gone quickly to work, delighting at the startling array of instruments packed in compared to the bare habitat she'd occupied on her third flight. For just a few minutes before getting to work, Tilly simply marveled once more at being in orbit, gazing out the porthole at the familiar blue-green world below her. Compared to visiting the moon or beyond low-orbit was merely a walk in the park to her now, but her familiarity with weightlessness did nothing to lessen the unadulterated joy that being in space gave her. Once the long background survey of local x-rays above the atmosphere was underway, Tilly wasted no time in deploying the optical telescope and opening the cover with the flick of a switch, floating across her small station to take up position at the hooded viewport containing the scope's eyepiece. Maneuvering the station and locking it in position for observations took concentration, but after a few minutes of frustrated blurriness Tilly finally focused in on her first target. "Aha! That's ice!" Tilly exclaimed to herself giddily as her telescope tracked the resolved red disc of Mars. The red planet had been an intriguing curiosity for her ever since first gazing up at it following her first moon landing, but through the weak telescopes on the ground and the hazy atmosphere she'd only ever seen it as a blurry smudge, details promised but never seen sharply until now. Clearly-defined white capped the alien world, and Tilly looked on in wonder at the strange landscape hinted at by the dark blotches of brown staining the red dirt. Nearly forgetting her mission for a moment Tilly quickly snapped a photo using the trigger at the telescope controls, smiling as she imagined the look on Dryden's face when he saw what she now witnessed. Keeping the red planet in view as long as she could Tilly easily imagined herself standing there, boots caked in rust-colored dust while the strangely-shaped moons sat motionless overhead joined by the tiny blue dot of the Earth. "Someday," Tilly said out loud to herself, looking up from the telescope and staring through her window at the red point of light before it slipped behind the curvature of the Earth.

>For two weeks Tilly orbited Earth again and again every ninety minutes, each day bringing new observations that enthralled mission control nearly as much as they awed herself. Neptune and Uranus interested her greatly as a concept, but spotting the two outer worlds had been a mild disappointment as the mono-colored planets gave up little detail. Still, with multiple passes and observations Tilly had recorded the existence of several previously-unknown moons around both distant worlds as well as strange thin rings around each planet, the belt around Uranus strangely toppled over in a way that baffled the little robot. Jupiter had been next on her list, now working inwards from the outer worlds one by one, and Tilly had been forced to check that her own visual processing wasn't glitching when first seeing the many sharply-defined cloud bands of the massive gas giant. She observed the king of the planets pass after pass, noting with a cry of excitement when the wide red spot she'd been waiting for appeared. Recalling what she'd read a few weeks earlier during her preparations for this mission, Tilly tried to process the visual data of the enormous red storm with the context of its sheer scale, and found herself unable to conceptualize what she was seeing in any clear way. Unsettled by the impossible to ignore thoughts of her comparatively minuscule scale, Tilly left Jupiter for future observations and turned the Harlow observatory carefully towards the solar system's ringed-jewel. Uncomfortable computation of world-sized hurricanes was replaced by silent awe as she gaped at the wide rings of Saturn through the telescope, snapping as many images as she could for the scientists back home. With preliminary observations done and the other instruments of her vessel busy gathering all manner of data by themselves Tilly found herself looking out the window for a long stretch of time, first staring at the points of light one by one, but then gazing at the black patches between them as curious speculation processed internally.

>At the beginning of her third week in orbit Tilly carefully oriented the Harlow observatory towards a new target, the station's flywheels spinning up and slowing to aim her in the desired direction. Looking through the viewport the pilot android expertly focused the optical telescope on a small patch of blank sky, carefully trying to resolve the image while the gyros and flywheels of the station kept her aim true. Already she'd seen much up here, but the new-found sense of scale she'd discovered on this flight urged Tilly to look further out. How far could she see? Curiosity and thrill drove her now as it had these past several years, and the promise of seeing something else new sent Tilly's CPU into overclock. Her view was black for several minutes, but as light filtered in slowly and her optics adjusted to the darkness Tilly began to see small smudges of light poking out from the inky curtain. "There's so many!" she said out loud to herself seeing the many strangely-shaped points of light beginning to resolve into disks, an irrepressible grin creeping along her faceplate until the corners reached both round cheek lights. Deep in the bowels of the station the mission chronometer ticked exactly three hundred and fifty hours of operation, and on cue one of the three flywheels maintaining orientation spun up rapidly without permission. The failing component reached unsafe speeds in a fraction of a second, blowing past its operational limit until it shattered inside the housing with a muffled 'crack'. In the span of only a couple seconds Tilly's view of the emerging galaxies blurred as the station picked up unexpected rotation. "Hey! What are you-" she began, then was stopped by a brilliant flash and a barrage of internal warning prompts. As the station rotated the sensitive optical telescope was turned on its axis, and pointed for just a moment directly at the sun. Tilly's vision was gone, a blackness punctuated only by the warning messages she sensed more than saw. 'No signal' two identical prompts read from each optic, followed quickly by an alert warning her to seek servicing. Breathing heavily to calm herself, Tilly looked around her cabin but could see nothing. Cautiously she ran a self-diagnostic, prodding carefully at her unresponsive optics hoping them to be only temporarily offline. After a half-second the report came back, delivering updated information to her CPU. "L-lens burnout?"

>Tilly blinked, and her vision remained worryingly unchanged. Panic started to rise, and the nandroid held her hands out in front of her groping around for anything she could touch. "Scrap, scrap, scrap!" Bumping into the cabin ceiling as she rose, Tilly whined and felt along the wall, disoriented. She had to call home, of that she was certain, but how? Reaching out cautiously metal fingers brushed over the array of switches and buttons at the control panel and she pulled back nervously. "T-they all feel the same," she muttered, her breathing quickening as she rapidly processed all the ways this might doom her. Feeling the station still tumbling through her internal gyro, Tilly put her arms around herself and squeezed, overclocked processor running wild with grim conclusions. At her chest she felt something small crack, and was momentarily distracted from the downward spiral she had been sent into. Unwrapping her arms from herself she patted her chest, sensor-laden metal fingers carefully finding the edge of her breast pocket and feeling the contents. One of the lenses of Georges unlucky sunglasses had popped out, and Tilly put a finger through the space where it had been. Taking a deep breath and letting out the hot air slowly, Tilly pulled her hand back out of the pocket and lightly slapped the lights at her cheeks. "Enough, you can do this!" she encouraged herself, and carefully began reaching around until her hands settled on the hooded viewscope of the telescope. Closing dead optics out of habit Tilly brought up image files from memory of the past two weeks, settling on her last view of the wall from the angle she now floated at. It was difficult, but as she slowly turned in place and recalled crisp memory files a mosaic of her surroundings began to form in her still-functioning visual processing unit. After ten minutes of matching images together, Tilly felt she had a good mental model of the station's interior, and carefully reached out to test her work. "Telescope," she said to herself slowly as she touched the spot where she expected it to be and felt the viewport again. "and the porthole is....yes!" Trailing her fingers up the metal wall she found the rounded opening and protective glass exactly where it should've been. "So the control panel is right over...there!" Tilly pointed despite not being able to see her own hand, and floated in the direction of the controls as seen in her mind's eye. On cue she stopped and felt for the switches, enlarging the image saved to memory of the beige-buttoned panel as she traced her finger over each one. "No, no, no, definitely not that one, aha!" As the felt shape of the radio controls matched her memory she was certain, and with only a moment's hesitation she depressed the switch to transmit. "Mission control, this is Harlow Observatory! I think I'm in trouble, Sirs!"

>Georges had rushed out of his office as soon as he'd gotten word of the situation, flat-out running the last hundred feet or so of hallway to the main control room. Gasping for breath, he'd needed to rest a moment at the doorway while the CAPCOM operator troubleshot with their pilot. "Not from in here no, the z-axis control won't respond at all. I think I could probably use the RCS on the Capricorn to stop this spin though sir." A sharp beep sounded after Tilly's voice rang out over the speaker, and Georges breathed in deep as he approached the radio operator and took the headset off the man's head in one quick move. "Tilly? Listen, the earliest we'd be able to come up there for you is after New Years," covering the microphone for a moment, Georges looked down at his CAPCOM operator who matched his own dubious expression. Even excepting for divine miracle there were serious doubts among mission control that the human-rated capsule would be ready quite so early. The radio crackled back for a moment, followed by the little robot's faraway voice. "So you're saying I've gotta fly in the dark if I wanna come back anytime soon, right?" Another shrill beep followed the end of her message. Around the room several of the men there exchanged looks of surprise and doubt. Georges stood silently for a long moment, looking around mission control at his team. All eyes rested on him now, and for the first time since taking the position he felt the responsibility heavy on his shoulders. 'either we lose her indefinitely because she's stuck up there, or she tries a return and maybe we get her back?' Georges thought to himself, wondering what kind of money he'd be willing to bet in Vegas on the robot's odds of survival. Holding the microphone to his face, the Director waited several more seconds before speaking, giving everyone in the room the same stern look. "We'll be coaching you from down here the whole time. C'mon home Tilly."

>Inside the slowly spinning station Tilly moved away from the control panel of Harlow station and pulled herself by memory through the hatchway connecting her capsule. The Capricorn design was familiar enough to her now that she was able to quickly pull herself into her seat and strap in by feel alone before searching her memory for images of the cabin from this position. Orienting her mental image of the controls with the feel of metal and plastic beneath her fingers, Tilly slowly brought the rotating station to a stand-still with short bursts from the capsule's RCS, breathing a sigh of relief as her internal gyroscope registered the feeling of stillness once more. From undocking through the burn for reentry and the coast towards the atmosphere below, Tilly stayed in constant communication with the ground team, Georges occasionally piping in a bit of encouragement that made her feel she wasn't alone. After over an hour of no visual input, Tilly felt oddly calm with her mental map of the small cabin grounding her. Only through re-entry itself was she nervous, the heated atmosphere around her capsule closing off communication with mission control for several minutes. On descent she was on her own, but was ticking down the seconds on her internal chronometer. Without visual data to tell her how close she was to the ground, she had only her timer and crossed metal fingers to ensure she didn't open her parachutes too early or too soon. The image of young James smacking a toy capsule into his bedroom floor played across her CPU for a moment, and nearly sent her spiraling back into worry before she headed the thought process off. "Only for pretend," she muttered to herself, and flicked the double switches to deploy the parachutes.

Epilogue

>Jones stood in the employee bathroom of Crosswire Press in front of a large mirror spanning several sinks adjusting his tie. After just a few short weeks he and his Sterling-provided assistant Penny would be returning to the Spaceflight Agency in Florida to cover a press event regarding their latest mishap in space. There were many things that the reporter was comfortable not knowing, such as exactly why certain rival companies to the robotics giant that owned his employer seemed to be having so many failures lately. He did not know precisely why such failures always seemed to occur not long after a visit by the unassuming duo tucked away in a wide press-pool followed by a slanted write up in their magazine, nor did he know in detail what Penny got up to when not by his side. What he did know was that the inscrutable nandroid's disappearing act whenever they were in the field to get a story always yielded juicy details and fine photography, and crucially he knew not to ask too many questions about her semi-regular contact with Sterling Robotics. Jones also quite keenly knew that the Floridian condo he'd bought last year wouldn't pay itself off, and knew that with each story of Sterling excellence they published their parent company's reputation improved along with his own job-security. Lastly Jones knew already what he'd be writing in his next story, and only needed a quote and photo from the Agency Director on why he'd backpedaled on contracting through Atlas, instead signing a hasty yet-to-be-announced exclusivity deal with Sterling. The door to the restroom opened slightly, and Penny's head poked in giving Jones a glance up and down. "Almost ready, Sir? It's nearly five." Jones turned to smile at her and gave a nod. "Lead the way!"


	10. Belka and Bonnie

>On the frigid tundra surrounding Tasiilaq Greenland a small camp had been hastily-erected, A flattened bit of land acting as helipad and sole route off of the permafrost. The ad-hoc settlement had been assembled in a joint effort between eastern and western robotics manufacturers, the result of over six months of negotiation between corporations following the loss of two pilots sent on the first joint-mission to the moon. Johnson, a short man with thinning blonde hair represented Sterling Robotics, and stood wrapped in a thick woolen winter coat beside his counterpart dispatched from the Soviet's robotics branch in a wide tent surrounded by the supplies required to keep the two dozen men of both companies alive for this exercise. The two representatives had met as Johnson's helicopter put him down behind Guskov, the latter Russian greeting him on the icy landing pad before they'd retreated to the relative cover of the largest tent in camp. "So, what'd they tell you?" Johnson said with a smile as he pulled the heavy hood off of his head inside. "Same thing they say to you, I imagine," Guskov began answering him, mirroring the American's movements as the pair stopped before a pair of wooden crates each marked with lettering from their respective nations. "Gathering of data on foreign machines working in tandem, that about size of it, da?" Johnson nodded to his familiar counterpart bemusedly. "Yep, that's about what I got from my bosses too. Given recent events though, I think there's plenty of room for speculation as to why we're doing this now, don't you?" Guskov's shoulders slumped as his colleague spoke. "Da, everyone talking about it both sides it seems. Robots set to be sensible choice moving forward, don't you think? Public sure seem to think so now." Johnson could only look away and nod somberly at the question. "Seems that way. My condolences by the way, Gagarin was a fine pilot by all accounts. I was sorry to hear of his passing." Johnson's Russian friend nodded and spoke quietly, not meeting the American's eyes. "Certain...compromises were made to achieve a Red Moon before your people, at least from what I understand. Seems that finally catch up with us, and poor Yuri paid price of expedient progress." A strained silence fell over the large enclosed tent for the next few moments, company crew from both teams scurrying around to secure equipment and avoid the gaze of the company representatives. Finally Johnson clapped his gloved hands together making a muted sound, and looked up at the taller Russian with a grin. "Well then, time to embrace the future eh? Let's wake 'em up."

>Prying the covers off the wooden crates had been done by company staffers, currently earning triple-pay for being subjected to the unlivable environs of Greenland even temporarily. Johnson scoffed once the pale straw had been brushed off of the Soviet robot resting dormant in her crate. "Jeez, you guys STILL haven't made them more aesthetic yet? I'm afraid I'd lose skin if I touched her in this cold!" Glancing up at his friend from the state-of-the-art automaton resting in the crate, Guskov frowned. "More aesthetic than brilliant stainless-steel? You people, all your robots look like child's porcelain doll! The shame of it." Johnson shook his head and smirked, turning his attention to the second crate as it was opened. "Your robots look like the aft-end of a water tower, you do know that don't you Guskov?" The Russian laughed heartily at that, hands resting on his protruding stomach. "And yours are like fragile little toys! Maybe I buy one for to sit on shelf looking pretty?" Both men laughed together, their familiarity with one another easing their lighthearted banter. "Well, let's see how they do together then, da?" Guskov said finally after they'd laughed themselves out. "Sounds good, go ahead and boot yours and I'll do the same." Johnson reached down into the wooden shipping container for the inactive nandroid's hand, holding it for a moment to initialize the startup process. Guskov made the same motion, but reached behind the Soviet machine's neck to open a small access panel and held down a switch there. Two sets of harddrives spun up, mirroring one anther's sounds in the tent drowned-out by the howling of the wind outside.

>Bonnie rebooted for the first time out-of-factory and was instantly nervous, her last memory being a vague description of her assignment being 'pending' in contrast to the family assignments her sisters had received. Coming-to in a shipping crate surrounded by straw wasn't exactly what she'd envisioned herself ever doing, and Bonnie took several seconds to brush the packing material from her faceplate and grip the sides of her crate to push herself up. Looking down at herself, she saw that she now wore an orange jumpsuit festooned with the kind of warning placard usually reserved for crash-test dummies. Looking at her surroundings, Bonnie wondered what strange assignment she'd been given, clearly there were no children here so what was her purpose in this cold place? Next to her in a similar wooden crate a soft click and hum sounded causing her to look to her right as a steel-skinned machine blinked herself awake, looking around in confusion with almond-shaped blue optics. As the foreign robot sat up from her packaging, both her and Bonnie exchanged confused glances before turning their wide optics towards the men who'd booted them. Booting quicker than her Soviet counterpart, Bonnie pulled herself from the shipping crate and stepped out, clasping her hands behind her back as the Russian robot hurried out of her own crate to stand beside her. "My name is Bonnie, it is my upmost pleasure to meet you!" Bonnie belted out in accordance with her training, stealing confused glances at the steel-skinned robot that moved to stand beside her and forgetting her customary curtsy. The Russian machine rose beside her standing at attention and rattled something off, only to be stopped as her handler raised a palm. "English Belka, you were taught it so use it." Adjusting, Belka glanced at Guskov once and stiffened. "Sir! I am designated as 'Belka', and I am prepared to carry out any task my master requires!" Stealing a glance at the nandroid beside her, Belka shortly turned her optics back to the only authority she recognized here. Bonnie curious as she was, found herself looking back and forth between the human who'd activated her and the shiny automaton beside her. Johnson and Guskov smirked at one another, watching their company's products awaken bewildered. Finally Johnson spoke up, Guskov chuckling and letting the American take the lead. "Ladies! Welcome to Greenland! If you're wondering what you're doing here then wonder no more! You've both been selected for a friendly joint-exercise!" 

>Both machines found it difficult at first to understand what they were being signed up for, though after more simplified explanations by their superiors they'd accepted the strange temporary assignment without complaint. Cooperation and survival, that was the simple goal. Both robots would be dropped over an area of the tundra already mapped in advance, and they would be expected to find their way back to basecamp within fifty hours aiding one another along the way. In order for the exercise to be considered a success both would need to return together, with failure resulting if they separated or called for help with their flareguns. For a ten minute period Belka and Bonnie stood together in the large tent, monitored by their handlers as they suited-up into their winter coverings. "Ah, nice to meet you by the way!" Bonnie offered with a sincere smile as the pair finished furnishing themselves with thick coats and gloves. "Da, likewise," Belka offered back casually, keeping her blue optics off of her apparent partner. Bonnie fidgeted in place as the pair waited for their escort to the waiting helicopter, and looked away from the unfamiliar Russian. "You think we'll do okay?" she asked quietly, mentally going over the checklist of disqualifying-actions that might end their joint training mission. Belka ran a hand through her thin white-blonde synthetic hair and shrugged before reaching for an ushanka hat. "Pretty simple, da? They say 'walk from point A to point B, how hard can it be?" Bonnie looked away again, and uncertainly picked up her assigned gear pack as if it were a dead fish. "If you say so..."

>The roar of the rotor overhead, Belka gave Bonnie a nod as the flight crew opened the side-door to the helicopter they rode in. "Ten seconds!" Rang the voice of their pilot in both of the robot's auditory sensors. Belka stood at the doorway parachute affixed to her back, and gave a glance backwards at her new partner. She'd never done anything like this even in her imagination, but orders were orders and refusal was simply not an option worth processing. With a deep breath, Belka gritted her teeth and threw herself from the helicopter, hurtling down through the sky downwards towards the endless expanse of white below as the unfamiliar acceleration registered internally as *DANGER*. Bonnie followed her a moment later, the nandroid froze up with optics widened by panic as she tumbled through the sky for several seconds. Spotting her Russian counterpart's chute jarred Bonnie into action finally, and she deployed her parachute only a moment after the steel-skinned robot. Separated by nearly a mile from the nandroid Belka landed feet-first and tumbled down a snowy hillside, grabbing at the terrain around her to attest her motion. As she finally halted on the inclined landscape, she quickly pulled at the straps attaching her to her parachute, the fabric sail now threatening to drag her along the ground at the first hint of wind. Freeing herself, Belka stood and took stock of her surroundings. The landscape was white, utterly and inescapably in all directions. Mountains rose in the distance, endless drifts of snow and rock surrounded her, and a harsh wind whipped across her steel features wicking-away internal heat nearly as fast as her body produced it. Less than a mile away she watched the billowing parachute of her partner drift down and land, fluttering in the wind in the distance. "Well, this is team-building exercise, no?" She said to herself as she began walking off in the direction of the downed robot. "Can't finish alone"

>Bonnie breathed heavily, exchanging processor and built-up joint heat for the cold Greenland air as she struggled to free herself. She'd jumped only a moment or so after the Russian but they'd fallen nearly a mile apart, and now the unprepared nandroid was stuck in the snow fighting with the lines of her parachute, desperately trying to untangle herself to no avail. A feeling of panic had set in for Bonnie as her efforts seemed futile growing only more entangled, but after fifteen frightening minutes she was reached by her Russian counterpart. "THERE you are, good grief you haven't even gotten out of your harness yet, what is wrong with you?" Belka barked harshly at Bonnie as the nandroid looked up at her terrified. "I, I can't! I'm all tangled up!" Bonnie replied in a frightened voice, pulling at the straps entangling her. "I'm sorry!" she added, pitiably. Belka sighed and moved down the gentle slope across the snow to reach her partner. "Easy, easy, stop struggling it only getting you more stuck," she said as she extended a hand down to the American robot. Within ten minutes the pair had worked together to cut the twisted ropes away from Bonnie with the blade from Belka's pack, and as Bonnie was helped to her feet they stood there together a moment with only a vague idea of what to do next. "You have internal compass too, da? Basecamp is due this-a-way, about thirty kilometers or so. Let's get a move-on." Bonnie froze at Belka's orders, and looked sideways to avoid the Russian's gaze. Belka blinked at her and frowned, placing her hands on her narrow hips. "We make straight line for base, simplest way to go, da? Do you object?" Looking around the landscape around them Bonnie noted the upward slope they stood on, and tried to process a more sensible route only stopping as Belka challenged her. "Well, alright. Sooner we get back the better, right?"

>Within the hour both machines had grown frustrated with the slow pace the landscape imposed on them as they climbed and descended snowdrifts capped with thin ice. The third time Belka felt her leg pierce the snow and plunge downward, the Russian yell out in anger. "Stupid! Why does this keep happening?!" Moving at a careful pace behind her, Bonnie carefully distributed her weight evenly and looked up at her partner worriedly. "Um, Belka? I think we might have a better time of it if we try the rockier parts, less snow that way right?" she said hesitantly pointing down the sloping hill and away to the harder landscape in the distance. Following her finger Belka processed this for a moment as she internally counted to ten to calm herself, her 'point a to point b' plan seeming to fall apart before her optics. "Da, think you right. May take little longer climbing over, but beats this for sure." As Bonnie helped extract Belka's stuck leg from the ice the steel robot thanked her and they moved carefully down the snowdrift, hand-in-hand to keep from sliding on the thin surface. After many minutes of strained silence while they climbed up to more solid ground, Bonnie found herself wishing to speak yet stuck processing the many various conversation starters she could use, unable to make any sort of decision on the matter. Silence did not bother Belka much, she'd had her fill of inane chatter even before her final boxing at the factory, but even so she thought it a good idea to break the metaphorical ice with the nervous nandroid. "So, any ideas on why they pick us for this...whatever this is?" she spoke up, glancing back at Bonnie who now wore a relieved expression at Belka taking the conversational lead. "Not especially, no. Before I shutdown for packaging, all I knew was that my assignment was 'pending'," she said, catching up with the Russian so they moved up the incline side by side. "I thought maybe I'd be booting up in a nice warm living room, not somewhere like this." Giving the nandroid a sideways glance, Belka frowned as she recalled her own earlier hopes of being given a family to care for, children to help raise and a home to maintain. "Da, me too." For another long moment, both were silent as they processed one another's words. "So! Ah," Bonnie chipped in, suddenly unsure of herself the moment she heard her own voice. "I guess they just what, picked us at random? Some lucky draw." Belka shrugged nonchalantly. "Maybe in your case, but think I might have good idea why I was selected," she said looking away from the nandroid, suddenly feeling a bit self-conscious at herself. Bonnie blinked at the Russian for a moment, clearly hanging on her words. "Oh?" Without taking her optics off the landscape Belka reluctantly continued with a sigh. "Factory training, it take months for you American robots too, da? Well, was maybe halfway through program, and one day out of nowhere, bam." Bonnie blinked again and repeated the word incredulously. "Da, 'bam'. Big blackout for whole of city, bad time for any robot caught recharging when it happen. Was in class then, when all lights shut off right in middle of lesson. Other robots there all start to panic, instructor lose control and room fall into chaos. Was scared myself, too." Lost in recalling the memory file Belka stopped, and Bonnie halted waiting dutifully beside her wearing a concerned expression. Suddenly smiling, the Russian looked up at her quickly and laughed off her internal digression. "Long story short, I shout loud at classmates and they all clam up real quick. Easy keeping them calm after that, and that make me not so afraid too, da? After, instructor called me 'good leader'. Not so sure that true, but company men seem to think it now." Realizing they'd stopped, Belka sheepishly imitated the sound of a cleared throat and began walking again, slowing just long enough for Bonnie to catch up to her. "Ehh, what about you though? Not convinced you just random 'off the shelf' pick either, maybe you top of class or something?" she asked hurriedly, switching the focus off of herself. Bonnie's circular red cheeks flashed red for a quick moment at the question. "N-no, I mean not especially well," pausing for a moment she looked away and put one arm around herself. "I mean, I usually got all the exam questions right, I just was always kind of slow about it." Belka listened silently as the pair crested the rocky rise in the land and began descending carefully down the gentle slope. "Like, there was one time when Ms. Bradburry asked us what the proper method was for halting a young child's temper tantrum. One of the girls answered 'pick up and hug the child until it stops being upset,' and even though it was early in training and I didn't know much yet, I still knew that was wrong!" Stifling a snicker at the internally-processed image of a nandroid squeezing the tantrum out of a tubby American child, Belka gave her partner a smile. "So you pipe up with right answer, I presume?" Bonnie shook her head with a more muted smile. "That's just it, I didn't. All the other girls were giving their own answers and I knew mine, but I kept going over it again and again like, I don't know, like I'd missed something. I thought I was right but I just, I couldn't be THAT sure, you know? I didn't answer first second or even third, I answered last." The nandroid fell silent for a moment, green optics glued to the ground as they walked. Belka's smile wavered slightly before prompting the nandroid again. "But, you DID get answer right after all? What was it?" Glancing back up quickly, Bonnie gave her a sheepish grin. "Oh! Yeah I did, it was 'distract the child with something they like'!" Both of the bundled-up machines giggled to one another over the shared bit of training as the frigid wind howled around them on their walk.  
>Shadows grew longer as the day wore on and transitioned subtly to dusk. The two traveling robots began spotting for shelter early at Belka's suggestion, and not long after Bonnie had pointed out a promising spot not far off their course. A natural indent in a rocky hillside had been covered by successive snowfalls, the accumulated drift sloping down and forming a half-roof over the spot the two machines chose as their resting site. Inside they had only a few feet of space and sat side by side with their backs against the rock, their boots nearly sticking out through the opening to the little enclosure. Rifling through their supply bags they each found their spare battery packs among what few items they'd been allotted, and with some careful maneuvering to snake the charging cables under their heavy coats managed to plug in for some much-needed charge. "Topography make it kind of hard to tell, but think we come little over halfway today!" Belka said with a proud smile as she rested gloved hands at her lap and leaned back against the rockface. Bonnie matched her expression and looked up at the icy ceiling above them. "If we keep up the same pace, we'll finish more than five hours early! I mean, there's still lots of variables of terrain and weather and-" Belka laughed and shook her head. "You worry too much! Look how simple today go, we do really good da?" Sighing happily at their progress she closed her optics. "Tomorrow will be good day too, so get some sleepmode." Bonnie looked over at the Soviet machine for a moment, admiring her confidence. "Yeah, you're right Belka. See you in the morning!"

>External pressure sensors all registered at once, sending a flurry of warning prompts through Bonnie's CPU just as her awareness was flickering back on. She tried to blink and found she couldn't, nor could she see anything but a dim glow all around her. When she tried to move her arms and couldn't, panic flooded her senses. For a few terrible seconds she felt completely alone, stuck in a white abyss with no way out. "Bonnie! Bonnie are you there?!" Belka's voice, muffled but close, snapped the nandroid out of her burgeoning hysteria. "B-Belka? Yes! Yes I'm here, what's going on?!" Bonnie tried lifting her arms again, and found a little space giving way on all sides as she moved. She wiggled her shoulders back and forth a few times and forcibly turned her head side to side. Blinking the snow off her optics finally she began looking around the tiny opening around her face. "Stupid roof collapsed on us! Don't panic, is only meter, meter and half maybe, we can dig ourselves out!" Belka said, clear worry palpable in her own voice as she tried calming her partner. "Okay! Yeah, it's not all that packed, you can kind of push on it some if you try! Here, hold on!" Bonnie shoved and pushed at the snow around her left arm, shifting through until she met steel resistance and heard a startled shout in Russian. "Okay okay I see, da!" Belka took several moments to shift around, finding it difficult but not impossible to move in the semi-packed snow which yielded under mechanical force. Turning in place slowly, both robots were able to climb upwards at an excruciating pace using the rockface for leverage to push their way though. Bonnie's gloved hands poked through the surface first followed shortly by Belka's as they brushed snow away from above their heads. Bright orange and near-white synthetic hair covered in snow poked through the surface, hats lost on the way up, and when both machines saw the sun above them and one another's faces sticking out of the white fluff neither could suppress a laugh at their success. Digging themselves out took several more minutes but went quickly as they cleared the space between them and helped each other climb out of the snow. "Here," Belka said cheerfully as they stood, reaching out and ruffling the loose snow from Bonnie's mussed hair before brushing through her own. Bonnie laughed and smiled warmly at her companion, suddenly glad to have been paired up despite her misgivings about the exercise. Belka returned the expression, grateful to have had a partner to help ground her. Bonnie's expression slowly shifted to confusion and then dread as she looked past the Russian's shoulder, and Belka turned to look. "What? What's-" Belka stopped mid-sentence as she spotted the lumbering white shape not yet running but very clearly trotting their direction. Large and round, yellowing white fur and a small black nose visible even at this distance. "W-what is that?" Bonnie asked in a hushed whine, a shiver running up her spinal struts as she watched the unfamiliar shape approaching. Belka had seen the creature once before in a magazine left on the instructor's desk, and instantly recalled one salient point. "Bonnie, how fast can nandroids run?" 

>Two robots bolted across the rocky snow-covered landscape for over an hour, neither ever looking back to see if they were still being chased. Belka had surmised that her own top running speed of around thirty kilometers per hour was roughly the same as Bonnie's stated twenty miles per hour, and they'd kept pace with one another through the long run back towards the company encampment. Joints aching from overheating, Belka and Bonnie slowed only the last few paces as a few camp workers gathered to watch, gasping for cold air to cool exchange for the built-up heat. Johnson exited the main tent to greet them first, followed only a moment later by Guscov. "Ladies, it wasn't a race you know! We didn't expect you for another eight hours at least!" Johnson said jovially, exchanging a surprised look with his Russian counterpart. "Well? Have good time out there?" Guscov asked as he glanced between the two snow-covered machines. "Bear!" "Roof fell in!" "Snowdrifts!" Belka and Bonnie spoke hurriedly between gasps, and the company representatives raised their eyebrows at one another. "Easy easy girls calm down! Just come on inside and we'll get you debriefed, copy some data and get you cleaned up, okay?" Johnson said reassuringly, putting an arm around Bonnie's shoulders. During the short walk to the large warm tent they'd first rebooted in, the two robots exchanged relieved smiles, each of them confident they'd performed well according to whatever standards they'd be held to.

EPILOGUE

>Belka and Bonnie rested inactive in their wooden shipping crates as two company workers replaced the packing straw over their still bodies. Johnson lit a cigarette before shoving his free hand in his jacket pocket to stay warm. "So what do you think? I mean we still have performance data to go over but you heard they way they talked." Guscov puffed thoughtfully on his cigar as he watched the lids being replaced over the two shipping crates. "Da, like old friends. And that story, chased by polar bear? Poor things probably saw one a kilometer away and took off like children. Is good though, they work together and that whole point." Johnson smirked at the Russian. "Safe to say we got what we really came here for eh? Two new candidates for the Space Agencies when they ask next, already tested and proven to work well as a pair independent of human direction." Guscov returned the expression and blew smoke above their heads, laughing in a knowing baritone. "They will do."


	11. Bonnie's First Flight

>Dipping one metal finger first into a shallow glass of water, Tilly ran it next over the glue lining the inside cover of an envelope. Sealing her latest letter addressed to a distant Mongolian postbox with a satisfied smile, the nandroid looked up for a few moments at the scribbled address on a little scrap of cardboard her foreign friend had given her, tucked into the edge of her small vanity mirror's frame. A sharp buzz rang over the ceiling speaker and Tilly jumped, rudely jerked back to the present from her wandering nighttime thoughts. "Tilly! Heeeey if you're still on up there, c'mon down to the office we need you to settle something for us!" Georges' slightly slurred voice rang out tinny over the small speaker, and she blinked her new optics at it curiously. "At this time of night?" she said out loud to herself, standing and moving to her modest closet puzzled. Trading her comfy white undershirt and pajama shorts for her blue Agency jumpsuit, Tilly double-checked her newly serviced internal chronometer and it read back to her nearly one am local time. What was Georges still doing at his office? Zipping the front of the jumpsuit up to her collar, she gave one look at her short hair in the vanity mirror, flattening it futilely before turning towards her dormitory door, duty-bound to answer Georges' summons even at such an hour.

>A brisk walk of no more than ten minutes through the dimly-lit hallways in the empty main structure of mission control brought her to Agency Director Georges' office door, a bright yellow glow shining from underneath as evidence of one of the only lights still on at this hour. When Tilly knocked once and turned the handle, her olfactory sensors were momentarily overwhelmed by the wafting tobacco hanging visibly in the air. "You cal-" Tilly blinked rapidly and waved a free hand in front of her faceplate a moment as she involuntarily calculated the parts-per-million ratio of the cigarette smoke clouding the small room. "You called, sir?" she repeated, one fresh optic twitching at the surface-irritation caused by wafting smoke. Sitting at his desk with both feet up was Georges, a short clear glass filled with a dark brown liquid pinched between his fingers. Across from him looking equally relaxed with his own drink was a slim man, wearing dark-rimmed glasses framed by thinning peppered hair. Scattered across the desk between them were several folders and dozens of papers, a few stained by fresh liquor and ash carelessly dropped nowhere near the ashtray. "THERE you are, good!" Georges said with a loose grin, his face registering as several shades more red than she was used to noticing. "Answer us this: Just what DOES a robot actually NEED if you wanna travel in deep space?" Georges asked pointedly, gesturing at her with his glass before taking another sip. Both the Director and his guest looked at her expectantly and Tilly had to think as she was suddenly put on the spot. "Need? You mean besides power? Um, hm. I guess having stuff to do helps, chores and things to keep you busy. Entertainment too, I really liked reading all the book files the control crew sent me with, and music too!" Smiling at the happier parts of her swing out around Venus and back helped to prevent her from reminiscing the darker moments of that trip still readily-accessible on file. "But!" Georges added, leveling his glass now at his human guest. "No oxygen, no water and especially no food! Think about all that extra mass Ted!" Looking down at the seated man Tilly watched him shake his head. "Georges, I never said it wasn't efficient to use robots, simply that it's not going to be the way forward forever! All you're doing now is trying to justify the current limitations placed on you!" The Director rolled his eyes and finished his drink, turning from his friend with an angry expression. "Well no shit, what else can I do right now?" Both men sighed as Georges poured himself another glass before topping off his guest's. Tilly watched the free-flowing alcohol uneasily, already trying to internally plot the odds of the Director being able to make it to the parking lot let alone home tonight. "Sirs? Can I ask what the occasion is?" she asked carefully when she looked back up at Georges, trying to phrase her dismay as diplomatically as possible. The two men shook their heads subtly, each of them looking away towards the floor for a moment. Finally the Director spoke bitterly, raising his newly-filled glass but not his gaze. "The death of manned spaceflight, strangled in its crib."

>Tilly could only think of her Soviet friend as the unfamiliar man called Ted explained to her the recent death of the USSR's first and only cosmonaut. "They tried playing it down as being an hereditary cancer, but even the average person doesn't buy that. Public perception is..." Ted trailed off, looking defeated. "Is fucking horseshit!" Georges finished angrily, wrenching open his desk drawer to fish for a fresh softpack of smokes. Tilly winced at the outburst, and Ted gave her a sad smile as he continued. "The President has called a moratorium on human-rating any spacecraft, the last thing he wants is a dead astronaut before an election." Blinking at him for a moment, the nandroid looked back up sharply as Georges lit his cigarette, his zippo shaking slightly in his hand as her CPU raced with the new information. "Not much incentive now even if he's reelected! Thanks to that dead commie bastard the common rube now thinks spaceflight is fatal!" Tilly winced again, recalling in an instant Tatyana's story about that cosmonaut cradling the damaged Russian robot all the way back to Earth and spending hours holed-up on the ground with wolves prowling around the outside of the landed capsule. Ted gave a sigh and shrugged. "He could have at least had the common decency to wait to die until after you got your first man up eh?," he said sardonically and Georges nodded, missing the meaning. Tilly made a small sound that imitated a human clearing her throat, getting both of their attention. "What does that mean for the program, for us I mean? I thought everything was already set for the manned Unity Base mission?" Georges made a disgusted sound and flippantly flicked ashes on his own floor. "Nah, that's being re-tasked for robot work now instead. Apparently that got decided from above before we even got word over here, so fuck me I guess right?" he scoffed indignantly and took another draw off his cigarette. Tilly straightened up and began to smile involuntarily. "You're sending me back to the moon base?" she said, trying not to sound too excited in light of the men's clear frustration. "Nope, got a call in from Sterling no more than an hour after the White House liaison left here, funny timing huh? They're shipping us over a new robot, should be here in a week or two. That one's gonna be tasked for Unity, not that I was asked mind you." Tilly's smile dropped away as she watched Georges take another sip. "Oh! W-well..." she trailed off for a few seconds, the specter of her looming retirement suddenly at the forefront of her focus again after months of compartmentalizing the existential fear. "What are you going to have me doing then?" Director Georges stared at his desk sourly for several moments, not saying anything and seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Tilly fidgeted in place nervously, and Ted looked up at her from his seat with an amused smirk before turning back to his friend and tapping on one of the thick manila envelopes littering the man's desk. "Yes Georges, what?" 

>"No, it's asinine and it'd never fly!" Agency Director Georges shouted dismissively after a moment's silence. "It already HAS flown Georges! The test rig anyway, you saw the photos! Look, you want an on-site demonstration of the test model? Done, I can have it here in two weeks!" Ted shot back defiantly, again tapping the thick folder. "I keep telling you it's all here! The bomblets, the pusher plate, the damned miniaturized reactor it's all been plotted out! We just need the commitment to put it all together!" Georges shook his head disgustedly and gestured at the confused nandroid standing behind Ted. "You hearin' this shit Tilly? Been getting an earful of it for the last two goddamned hours," snuffing out his cigarette the Director sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Glancing back and forth between the men nervously for a moment, she looked over Ted's shoulder at some of the paperwork sprawled out across the desk. Measurements, diagrams, flight trajectory calculations, what was all this? "And you SHOULD be getting an earful dammit!" Ted fired back, his voice rising enough to make Tilly take a step back from him. "I thought you of all people would be in favor of this project! You already have Venus under your belt, and THIS," the greying man banged his fist on the folder hard enough to make the near-empty whiskey bottle next to it jump. "THIS is how you get MARS!"

>Tilly's blue optics had lit up at the word, and without a thought she'd brushed passed Ted to look at the spread out documents now in more detail. "Mars? You wanna send me to Mars?" she asked excitedly, forgetting herself for a moment and looking back at Ted with a beaming smile. The man returned her expression, glad to finally hear some enthusiasm for the idea he'd come here to pitch. "C'mon Ted, don't get her hopes up. The Test Ban Treaty is gonna just shut all that shit down even if we go for it full-bore now," Georges interjected before his colleague could answer the excited nandroid. "The Test Ban Treaty hasn't been finalized yet," Ted offered up hopefully. "There's still time to push for an above-the-atmosphere exemption!" Georges shook his head again, this time slowly as he stared at the paperwork covering his desk. "Ruskies have no reason to agree to an exemption for nukes in space just so we can one-up them with a trip to Mars. That treaty kills your pet project dead, Ted." Tilly blinked, her smile fading as she turned to see the man next to her slump in his seat dejectedly. For a few brief seconds she processed all the factors she'd heard from the semi-sober men on the situation, and voiced her simplest answer without thinking it through. "You could offer them a ride," the nandroid said with a sincere shrug. Both men went silent and stared at her blankly. Suddenly self-conscious with the men's attention on her, Tilly looked away and scratched the back of her neck awkwardly wondering if perhaps it was a dumb suggestion. "You know," Ted began slowly, setting his glass on the desk and leaning on his elbows. "If their agency handles design and fabrication of the lander while we put together the main vessel for a PAIR of robots..." Georges eyes lit up at the implications of the unfinished sentence. "Holy shit, half a sample-return mission is one HELL of an incentive for a treaty exemption." Ted grinned, realizing he had Georges exactly where he'd been trying to get him all evening. "Round trip, one hundred thirty days plus surface-time. Sample return for two nations, a joint mission just like Unity Base. Soviet lander, American spaceship, costs and rewards both split. What do you say? Worth pitching the idea?" Georges wavered for a moment in his seat, looking back and forth between his friend and his Agency's robot. Downing the remaining liquor in his glass, he set it back down nearly hard enough to break it, nodding suddenly. "Fuck it then, it's worth a shot." 

>Half a world away in Farnborough, Hampshire, rain pelted down from grey skies onto thick panes of dirty glass lining the exterior of the county's outmode reclamation plant. Staring out the windows of the last stop for outdated machines was a pretty little nandroid, a regional variant for the UK sold abroad by Sterling Robotics of the United States. Tracey watched without really seeing as the raindrops struck the glass and streaked down, her processor taken up by thoughts as dark as the clouds above. It had already been half a year since she'd been shipped to this final resting place of robots, but like a handful of others Tracey had forestalled her systematic execution by nature of being outwardly undamaged. Most of the machines who came through this place were at the end of their lifespans, falling apart either physically, mentally, or some combination of the two, but a few robots were returned undamaged and these were seen as too useful to be simply recycled. Tracey had been put to work at the reclamation plant once she'd arrived filling in where human workers would prove too costly to be worth employing, and had quickly settled in to dishing out unidentifiable slop to the human workers in the plant's cafeteria each afternoon. Staring out through the window at the gated yards, Tracey sighed and set her metal hand against the glass. Closing navy-blue optics for a moment, she recalled a memory file not-too-distant of herself playing with her former young charge on the carpeted floor of her old family's home. As her memory files played themselves over her CPU she took no notice of the long black car pulling into the yard, or the slickly-dressed gentleman who emerged from it under his chauffeur's umbrella. Without paying attention, Tracey had no way of knowing how long the visitor had stayed before she'd heard the footsteps coming up the staircase and down the hall to her otherwise unoccupied and nearly empty room. "Tracey luv?" a short fat woman said as she pushed open the door, not bothering to knock. "There's a man downstairs," she continued not waiting for a reply from the morose machine. Clasping her hands together with a grin, the orderly practically sang out her words. "I think we've found you a new assignment!"

>Hall stood uncomfortably in the expansive entryway of the soulless structure before the now empty front desk. His given task and given budget starkly opposing one another, he'd had to get creative in order to meet his superior's deadline, and standing here in this dismal building he wondered now if he was cutting the right corners. After a few minutes of waiting, the plump woman who'd greeted him reemerged through a door trailed by a robot with synthetic chestnut hair pulled into a tight bun behind her head with only a few stray strands escaping the bind. "You said you were in the market for something pretty? Undamaged and fully-functional? We'd surely miss her here," the round woman sang pleasantly, gripping Tracey by the shoulders. "But if the price is right and it's for the greater good, I'm sure we'll manage!" Tracey looked up over her shoulder at the orderly, then gave a skeptical glance to the stranger at the front desk with her sharply blue optics. Hall didn't bother to look at the robot longer than a few seconds before digging in his coat pocket. "A thousand pounds, take it and don't bother haggling. She wouldn't be worth even that as scrap, and it's not as if you have many customers here to begin with," the stranger said tersely, raising the plump orderly's hackles. "Well! It IS rather unorthodox to purchase an outmoded machine from us in the first place yes, but-" Hall cut her off with a raised hand. "Then a thousand will be plenty, yes?" Holding a thick envelope shaped like a stack of bills before the aging woman's eyes quieted her for a moment, then she nodded quickly. "Unorthodox yes, but perfectly legal!" she said, waggling a finger at Hall while she took the enclosed stack of currency. "Just give me a moment, I'll fetch the paperwork to go with her!" the orderly sang out as she turned and disappeared through the doorway leading from the entrance to the rest of the facility. Hall and Tracey were left alone there for a few moments, and neither spoke quickly. Tracey looked up after a minute of silence between them, and saw the stranger staring off at a nondescript wall. "You have an assignment for me, sir?" she asked quietly, turning her optics up at him. The idea of suddenly serving a new family after what she'd been through struck her as unnerving, but she tried not to show it. "Hm? Oh, yes," Hall replied finally when she'd caught his attention. "The Royal Aircraft Establishment has need of a robot, sooner rather than later. Bit of a budget crunch though, which is what led me to you I'm afraid." Tracey looked away and frowned, reminded of her status as a used machine. "Whatever it is you need me to do, I'll be sure to give you my best sir." 

>"Let's see," Hall said casually after taking his position in the driver's seat of his black Austin/Morris 1100, casually flipping through Tracey's paperwork while she slid into the backseat by default silently. For several seconds his eyes darted across the product history, stopping at her reason for winding up at the reclamation facility. "Oh." Looking up into the rear-view mirror he caught the nandroid's optics for a moment and sighed. "I'm so sorry." Tracey stiffened, her hands clasping one another as she quickly looked away from the man's reflected gaze. "Yes sir. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather focus on my future assignment." Hall caught the terseness of her tone and started his car, wondering briefly to himself if this machine would be up to the task he was signing her up for after all. "Yes well, about that," he began, clearing his throat. Where to begin? Collecting his thoughts while he pulled away from the dismal place and onto the main road, Hall fell easily into the bog-standard speech he'd pitched to countless officials over the last year. "You're no-doubt aware of the robots who've flown to space and back from the United States and Soviet Union?" He waited until Tracey voiced her unsure acknowledgment before continuing. "Well, with the launch window to Mars coming up in two months we have the timely opportunity to match their achievements. Do you know how many British-built satellites have been been launched so far?" Tracey blinked in response, genuinely caught off guard by the man's sudden sales-pitch. "I, no sir I'm afraid I don't." Hall nodded to himself as he rounded a corner. "Six, all relays for continuous ground communication with spacecraft, and the first constellation of its kind I'll add. But only two of them flew on OUR rockets you see, we paid the yanks to fly up the other four on their rockets." Gripping the wheel a little tighter, Hall grimaced. "And lately, there's been talk in Parliament of outsourcing the whole bloody program to them. Can you imagine that? Giving up the capability to put craft in orbit ourselves?" Tracey tried to follow, but found herself stuck wondering what any of this news had to do with her. "It's imperative that we show the public that this hasn't all been a waste of funds, and a few satellites aren't enough to justify continuing an entire space program." Hall paused as he crossed through a roundabout, focusing on the road for a few moments before rounding the sales pitch back to Tracey. "And that's where you come in."

>Tracey's CPU hummed as she processed what Hall was telling her, the black automobile turning another corner and stopping at the checkpoint outside of the RAE's grounds. With time, budget and political will all running out, Hall and his team were outright ditching the troublesome automation they'd broken their backs failing to get working, and would instead be resorting to a mechanical pilot for the hastily-planned Mars-shot. Hall flashed his badge at the checkpoint and a small gate rolled back, letting him drive forward alongside a far-stretching runway and passed several wide hangers. "Sir, I don't," Tracey began to protest, then quickly revised. "I don't know the first thing about flying." Frowning, she stared out the window gloomily at the elongated stretch of asphalt to their left. Hall only shook his head, staring ahead at the private road stretching back towards the administration building on the far side of the complex. "Neither did those other robots at first. Besides, whether we obtained a preowned unit like yourself or purchased a brand new one, we'd still have to put you through the proper training regardless so previous skill is no prerequisite here." Tracey winced at 'preowned' but said nothing, and Hall failed to notice. "Don't worry, you'll do fine. You'll have a battery of tests to perform, a crash-course on spacecraft operations and familiarizing yourself with your vehicle, some basic stress testing," Tracey jumped in her seat and Hall caught it in his rear-view mirror. "No no nothing like that, they're just going to put you through your paces on the centrifuge and inspect your rad-shielding to confirm it's adequate for deep space, simple as." Tracey calmed her momentary panic, the words 'deep space' sticking out to her curiously. "And after that, you want me to ride on a rocket? Is that correct Sir?" she asked, running the mental image of herself strapped to a firework across her processor in milliseconds. The car passed the end of the runway strip and was flanked on either side by short trees lining the drive. "All the way to Mars. How about that, hm?" Hall answered her back, a little condescendingly in her opinion. She processed again for a moment, realizing with a sudden mental click that she was being asked to travel far away from everyone and everything in the whole world, maybe for good. "That sounds rather lovely, in fact." Tracey said, surprising the both of them with her sudden readiness.

>Sunset painted the Floridian skies at first red, then a deep purple as the light faded and floodlights clicked on one by one at the American launch site casting their beams on the large and varied buildings populating the complex. Tilly walked slowly across the facility towards the wide dish antenna at the far end of the grounds, accompanied by and keeping pace with Deputy Director Dryden. "It's more dim over there, away from the runway lights and VAB lamps," he said as he watched the first stars begin to poke out overhead for a moment before glancing down at his pocket watch to check the remaining time. Tilly followed his eyes upwards as they strolled, keeping watch for anything she recognized in the early night sky. "You really think we'll see it?" she asked curiously, turning her blue optics back to the aging man. Dryden shrugged as he looked up from his watch. "Hardly any clouds, so we should be able to, yes," he answered as the pair reached the large array and slowed. Dryden carefully put his back against the structure housing the antenna and slid down until he sat on the concrete with a slight groan. Tilly took up her place next to him, leaning back against the wall and pulling her legs up to her chest as they both fixed their gaze on the darkening sky. "So," she started carefully, her curiosity built up over the past few days since being present for Ted's late-night mission pitch. "Hear anything from Director Georges lately?" Dryden gave her a sidelong glance, looking surprised but amused. "So you heard already, huh?" he asked slyly before chuckling at the blushing nandroid. "Our focus right now is still on the third lunar joint mission, every day Unity Base goes unmanned is time wasted as far as the administration is concerned. However," Grinning, Dryden thought back to the pitch Georges had made to his team only a day ago. "We're apparently going to start preliminary planning for a Mars-shot as soon as the new robot is up there." Tilly's optics lit up at hearing her suspicions confirmed. "If she's gonna be on the moon, then that means you're gonna send me, right?" the nandroid said hurriedly, unable to hold back her excitement. Dryden laughed gently and shook his head. "Don't get ahead of yourself, we haven't even begun designing anything yet. If we're ready by the next launch window in two years I'll be shocked." Tilly's shoulders slumped as reality intruded on her dreams once more. Two years? What would she do before then, serve more coffee? "Oh, speaking of," Dryden added after a moment, noting the disappointment in the small machine and wanting to divert her attention. "She arrived by shipping pallet today, the new pilot I mean. We're going to boot her up tomorrow before lunch, you're welcome to join us if you'd like. It's not exactly a formal thing but well, you remember when we booted you up for the first time here don't you?" Tilly nodded slowly, a slight smile creeping along her faceplate. She recalled the memory file fondly: the new glow of the florescent lights overhead, the detected scent of fabric freshener from her Sterling-Standard blue dress, stepping out of the cardboard box and curtsying after her introduction, the amused faces of Georges, Dryden, Director Debus and half a dozen curious engineers standing around her. "I do," she answered back after a millisecond of recollection. 'Should I be there?' Tilly asked herself internally, remembering the feelings that had accompanied her previous replacement's arrival to the Agency. Maybe it would be best to keep her distance from the new robot, at least for now she thought. "Aha! Should be any time now!" Dryden said suddenly distracted as he grinned at his pocket watch, interrupting the nandroid's processing thoughts. Both of them looked up, scanning the darkened sky for any hint of motion. "There!" Tilly shouted in recognition, pointing at a slowly growing dot of light moving across the top of the atmosphere.

>Without the periodic station-keeping burns required to boost the station's orbit, the abandoned Harlow Observatory had slowly fallen over the past weeks until the fringes of the atmosphere tugged it downwards into a predictable fatal decent. As solar panels sheared off and the station began to heat up, the hull glowed a fierce orange that lit up the night sky over Tilly and Dryden's heads. "And there she goes," Dryden said sadly as he watched the orbital observatory burn up across the sky, trailing debris that glowed briefly and winked out. Tilly stared at the fiery sight arcing overhead, remembering her brief few weeks there fondly. Dryden sighed as he watched the burning station shrink and begin to dim as it flew out over the ocean. Looking away from the waning light, Tilly watched the man's expression as he stared outwards lost in his own thoughts. Gently, the nandroid put a hand to his shoulder in comfort. "I'm sorry about your space telescope, it really was nice," she said softly, unsure of how to break the man's sudden palpable melancholy. Snapped from his thoughts Dryden looked down at her when he felt the metal hand as his shoulder, then gave her a wide smile. "And I'm glad that you flew on it, you saw so much for us up there," inhaling slowly, he let out his breath as if releasing some pent-up worry. "and, there will be others." The dim glow of the space debris winked out completely somewhere over the ocean, but neither the elder man nor the robot beside him moved to stand just yet. "I'd fly another one for you, Sir," Tilly said confidently. "Honestly, getting to see all that up there was worth the burnt-out optics, at least to me." Dryden raised an eyebrow at her and grinned at the little robot's enthusiasm. "I hope you won't be offended when I say I'm glad we sent a robot," he offered back jovially. Tilly laughed and pushed herself to stand, looking down at the older man and extending a hand. "We both know you'd have gone yourself if they'd let you, Sir"

>Pre-boot system checks called out through Bonnie's sub-processors, every component checking in as functional before spinning up her drive. A gentle green glow lit up from within her optics, and after a moment artificial lids ran over them quickly as she blinked herself to awareness. For the first few milliseconds she was awake, Bonnie processed the environment around her and replayed the last memory files she had from before her shutdown. Echoes from voices and banging machinery rang out from the distance of the wide structure she was now in, but the handful of humans standing in front of her were silently watching as she came to. The crate she'd been shipped in stood upright, some of the straw used to pack her in having spilled out onto the hanger floor. Taking a few unsteady steps out, she brushed off the remaining straw clinging to the sun-bleached army green flightsuit she'd been shipped in. "My name is Bonnie, it is my upmost pleasure to meet you!" she rattled off with a mimed curtsy missing a skirt to do it justice, mildly frustrated that she kept having to introduce herself to what she kept presuming would be her permanent owners. One of the men standing closest to the newly-awakened nandroid held up a clipboard and flipped through a couple pages reading notes. "Bonnie: eight months since assembly, all Sterling training passed and certified. Participated in a company exercise alongside a foreign machine, exercise passed AND it's noted that you exceeded expectations regarding cooperation. Shipped to Edwards Airforce Base for pre-flight conditioning, benchmarks all set with minimums passed before shipping out here." Bonnie blinked at the rapid replay of the few months comprising her life, but after processing the information for a moment nodded. "Yes Sir, I was told everything that they had me do would be pertinent to my new assignment!" Optics focusing beyond the man standing before her, Bonnie spotted at once an orange-haired nandroid standing in the distance, leaning against the open hanger door with arms crossed and staring intently in her direction. She blinked once at the faraway robot, but a moment later she was gone and her focus was returned to the men in front of her. "It was, and it significantly reduces the time it's going to take to condition you for spaceflight," the man holding the clipboard said with a terse smile, finally glancing up at her for the first time. Bonnie stiffened, not fully believing until now what the men at the air force base had all assumed her assignment would be. Spaceflight? She wavered slightly but kept her balance, squaring her shoulders and giving a delayed smile at the man before her. "W-well, I'm ready for whatever you throw at me next Sir!"

>The following week was even more demanding than the brief stint at Edwards had been for Bonnie as she grew acclimated to the layout of the launch facility and ran through a series of tests to confirm her previously established baselines. After a final inspection by Collins she'd been cleared to begin training in the enclosed simulator, learning the basics of spacecraft operation through trial and error. Launch procedures and rendezvous simulations had gone smoothly the second and third times respectively, each mistake sharpening Bonnie's skill quickly as she learned what not to do. Twice during the first few days of her simulator training, the frizzy-haired robot had emerged from the simulator just in time to see the back of another nandroid departing the room, blue jumpsuit matching the new Agency one she now wore herself. Bonnie was not completely ignorant of her new assignment, and during her short stay at the desert airbase had learned some about the pending job through a stray magazine. Only a few months passed publication, it featured a cocky looking middle-aged man sharply dressed beside a nandroid wearing a simple blue jumpsuit splashed across the cover. With unneeded permission Bonnie had taken the issue of Crosswire Press back with her to the bunk she recharged in, and poured over the brief and oddly critical write-up of the man who'd sent a robot to space. Most of the detail was confusing to her out of context, but the light paragraph detailing the short-haired robot's flights over the past few years both enthralled and intimidated her. As Bonnie exited the simulator, she again caught the sight of the first pilot's back as she disappeared out the door. Blinking after the aloof nandroid left the room, Bonnie looked down worriedly at Collins while she descended the short staircase leading into the enclosed mock-up. "That's the third time I've seen her, does she always watch my simulator runs?" Collins glanced up from his clipboard and looked to his right, suddenly noticing the absence of the machine who'd come to watch. "Hm? Oh, Tilly?" He looked back up at Bonnie with a shrug. "Not always. She asks about your scores, but that's about it." Bonnie stopped at the bottom of the small staircase, now looking up to meet the man's eyes as he continued. "You two are pretty neck-and-neck apart from your landing-sim scores," Collins started, making her wince at the numerous simulated failures she'd had trying to think decisively and correct for problems in short order. The man caught the dejected look on the nandroid's faceplate, and quickly added "but your co-pilot for JM-3 to Unity is going to be handling descent so it shouldn't be an issue." Looking up from his clipboard after jotting down an extra note, Collins caught Bonnie staring worriedly towards the door. "You two have met already, haven't you? I thought you'd have bumped into one another by now." Shaking her dark orange curls Bonnie turned her optics back to the man. "No, our recharging rooms are on the same wing of the main building, but we haven't run into one another yet." Glancing downwards, she replayed each memory file she had of seeing the veteran pilot disappear down a hall or round a corner just as she'd caught sight of her, a feeling of insecurity running over her processor. "Well, go introduce yourself then," Collins said, raising a hand as if it were an obvious statement. Bonnie replayed the article on Tilly over her processor in a fraction of a second. First orbit, three moon-landings, Venus, Bonnie reeled just thinking about it. "M-maybe later, sir" 

>Three days later Tilly stewed, pacing the grounds outside the main building with a bevy of conflicting thoughts running over her processor. She'd wanted to introduce herself that first day when the new pilot booted up, but had stopped herself for reasons she still found difficult to articulate. Since then she'd taken to avoiding the new robot, always sure to not be in the same room when she arrived, somehow feeling more at ease with not knowing her. Infantile dismissal had given way quickly to genuine curiosity though, and Tilly had found herself arriving at Bonnie's training simulations a few minutes after her each time to keep up on the nandroid's progress. Jealousy? Tilly had suspected it of herself at first, but comparisons of their test scores and baselines had shown her no rationale for that emotion. What was it then, why was she so uneasy to meet the new pilot? Stopping near the entrance to the main administration building she sighed at herself for getting worked up over something so trivial. Crossing her arms she put her back to the building's exterior and leaned against it, casting her blue optics upwards at the new night sky. The file of her last heated exchange with Kimmy, her previously intended replacement, ran across her processor on-loop tonight. Tilly frowned at the memory, looking downwards at the pavement angrily. Even in spite of the short-lived robot's prickly exterior, Tilly couldn't help but regret not having known her better, and that feeling conflicted starkly with her unwillingness to meet the new pilot that had joined her Agency. More than a dozen yards away Tilly heard the double doors of the main building slam shut, grabbing her attention. Curiously she sat still, rapidly perusing the list of Agency personnel who would still be here at this hour. Hearing the slowly approaching footsteps, she ran the pattern quickly through her processor and registered it as mechanical, too precisely-timed for anything organic. Stiffening, she remained silent for a few moments as the shape of her fellow pilot rounded the corner hesitantly. A momentary feeling of satisfaction gripped Tilly for a moment, her presence remaining undetected by the wandering nandroid while she passed. Unable to suppress a little smile at the thought of catching her off guard, she spoke up suddenly and without thinking. "Hey, what are you doing out here?"

>Bonnie jumped, her wandering thoughts interrupted without warning and her paranoia apparently justified by the jarring accusation. "I'm sorry!" she said reflexively. After a millisecond, she registered the voice as synthetic and focused her optics in the darkness on the jumpsuited nandroid leaning against the building, feeling a sense of dread that she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't. "I-I just wasn't ready to power down and I thought I'd take a walk and- I'm sorry! Please don't tell anyone I was out here!" Bonnie babbled apologetically, throwing Tilly off for a few seconds as she listened. "Hey, hey!" Tilly raised her hands and gave a little shrug. "Nobody ever said that we couldn't be out here at night, relax," she said in a reassuring tone, smiling as the curly-haired nandroid seemed to take her advice slowly. "O-oh, it's really okay? Sorry, it's just, you just startled me that's all. Um," Bonnie felt suddenly awkward standing there across from the unfamiliar veteran pilot, and held her hands at her chest with some visible tightness building in her shoulders. Tilly remained still against the concrete wall of the building, carefully studying the nervous and unsure body language of her fellow nandroid. Whatever smug confidence that had laid behind Kimmy's lenses was nowhere to be seen in Bonnie's wide green optics, and Tilly quickly found her apprehension falling away watching the robot fidget. "I'm Tilly," she said finally and bluntly after Bonnie's internal debate on how to introduce herself stretched on a beat too long. Unfolding her arms she stretched out one hand, reflexively imitating the informal greeting used between the men of the Agency. Bonnie stared at it for a fraction of a second, decided that a curtsy was unnecessary, and reached out to shake hands. "Bonnie, i-it's nice to finally meet you, I uh," pulling her hand back after a moment, she looked away and gripped her other arm. "I sort of thought you were avoiding me." Tilly's cheek lights lit up momentarily, lighting her faceplate with a red glow in the darkness before she laughed awkwardly. "I might've been, a little," she admitted with a guilty smile. Both of them looked down for a moment, shuffling their feet each still a little nervous around the other. "You said something about a walk?" Tilly said after a few seconds, breaking the silence. "If you don't mind a little company, I'm not ready to recharge yet either."

>Bonnie spent the first few minutes of their walk around the complex feeling nervous, but as they talked her previous mental image of Tilly being some stoic fighter-pilot personality like the men at the Air Force base was replaced by her own more subdued observations. The veteran pilot was friendly, and the more they spoke they more at ease she seemed to become, which in turn comforted Bonnie out of her initial starstruck feeling. "So, get to do anything interesting before starting all this?" Tilly said casually with a smile as they strolled across runway tarmac. "Before? No, I don't think so," Bonnie replied, looking down at the black paved surface for a moment. "I mean, kind of? I think the exercise Belka and I did was part of 'all this' though. Before that, nothing. First bootup, inspection, Bradburry's classes, graduation then..." she trailed off. Tilly glanced at her and felt a pang of sympathy for the curly haired nandroid cross her CPU. "Then, you got given an assignment you weren't ever prepared for, right?" In an instant she recalled her own confused bootup at the Agency for the first time, and how she'd done her best to acclimate to the unorthodox job of caring for grown men rather than children well before she'd ever been selected for flight. Bonnie nodded, a look of sadness crossing her faceplate briefly. Tilly thought quickly to lift the suddenly morose mood. "On the bright side, this assignment can be pretty neat sometimes! Do you know when you're supposed to fly?" The two robots crossed the runway and kept going in a straight line from where they'd set out. Tilly wasn't consciously steering them, but Bonnie followed her anyway as the pair walked along the grass. "I haven't gotten a date yet, no. I do know what they want me to do though," Bonnie answered slowly. Tilly stuck her hands in the side pockets of her jumpsuit, an unconscious imitation of Georges, and looked upwards at the sky. "They're going to send you to orbit and back first, am I right?" Glancing back down Tilly caught Bonnie's surprised optics and grinned sheepishly. "Collins never said it to me directly, but I'm guessing they want to make sure you work in orbit first before trying to send you all the way to the moon." Bonnie gasped, looking at the older pilot in surprise. "How do you know that? I mean, y-you're right, Mr. Collins said I'd have to prove myself on a mission first before going to," she stopped mid-sentence and gulped, a purely cosmetic reaction but one reflective of her feelings. "to the moon," She finished, hesitant before looking up at the silver crescent in the sky. Tilly watched her with a smile for a moment before following her eyes up. "I think you'll like it," she said confidently, gazing up at the small world above them. Bonnie looked at her suddenly, a nervous expression crossing her faceplate. "Isn't it dangerous? I heard," stopping herself, she looked away suddenly wising she hadn't thought of it. "I heard two robots shut down up there." Tilly gave a little shrug, momentarily reviewing the stored image file of Kimmy and Irina on the lunar surface but shaking it off with a smile. "It can be, yeah. I still think it's fun though."

>Launch was mere minutes away, and the men of mission control gathered around shoulder to shoulder to watch. The old control room from the early days of the Agency had been converted first to storage and then later to a small lounge, a projector displaying one of the three available television channels against one wall in dull muted color. Behind a trio of couches which had replaced old control consoles Tilly stood anxiously, watching along with the men the slow countdown on the live broadcast. Looking down from the projector screen she identified Director Georges, sitting only a few spots away from Deputy Director Dryden. Collins sat one couch over, pensively watching the progression of the countdown sandwiched between a pair of lower engineers. "I'm glad you're here," Bonnie's voice rang out from behind her, and Tilly turned to meet her with a smile. "Nobody invited me to watch and I wasn't sure it'd be okay." Tilly giggled and shook her head. "Nobody cares if we watch or don't Bonnie, and nobody's stopping us either, right?" A passing engineer gave the two robots a raised eyebrow as Tilly spoke before taking his seat. Bonnie stifled a laugh. "Sure! If you say so Tilly!" Smiling at the older nandroid, she turned her optics towards the large screen dominating the room. "Three minutes and counting," the posh accented voice from the television rang out through the speaker system. Bonnie blinked at the spectacle of the foreign rocket on the screen, standing alongside a steel tower surrounded by desert somewhere on the Australian continent. "Have the British done something like this before?" she asked, turning towards Tilly in concern. The older nandroid shook her head slowly. "They flew a couple of satellites, at least according to Mr. Dryden, but nothing beyond that until now." Looking longingly at the unfamiliar grey and white rocket on the screen topped in red, Tilly suddenly felt envious of the robotic pilot on board. Bonnie looked back at the screen nervously, hands fidgeting with each other in front of her chest. "So she's got to fly on that thing all the way to Mars, even though they've never tried it before?" Her tone was incredulous at first, and wavered at the end as she imagined all the potential disaster scenarios that'd been plaguing the back of her mind. Tilly grinned and tilted her head back to look at her sidelong. "Welcome to the Agency, Bonnie."

>Liftoff of the Black Arrow Heavy rocket from Woomera spaceport proceeded as planned, the booster-supported missile staging without issue all the way to orbital insertion. Tracey breathed heavily to cool an overtaxed CPU once the engine shut down, her optics closed for several minutes after confirming her orbit with Jodrell Bank. She had a ninety minute orbit around the Earth before she would be expected to perform the next long burn placing her cramped crimson capsule on a trajectory for the red planet. Breathing in the thin mostly nitrogen atmosphere inside the cabin Tracey replayed her last few weeks, feeling somehow tired despite a full charge. Simulator training ad nauseam, centrifuge tests to ensure her structural integrity, float-tests in a small pool weighted down to give buoyancy and a sense of weightlessness, whole textbooks crammed as fast as she could commit them to her drive. Looking out through her capsule window, Tracey frowned at the unforgiving world beneath her. As she had so many times since, Tracey involuntarily recalled the worst memory held on file, one she could never delete but always dreaded replaying. At just six years old Andrew tossed a ball with impressive vigor towards Tracey in their family's short front yard, who caught it with a happy laugh at the young boy's coordination. She opened her mouth to offer praise, but her sensitive hearing detected the loud ring of the household telephone from inside. "Tracey!" the voice of her mistress called out through the open screen door from her home. "Would you get that, dear?" Tracey gave one look at Andrew and underhand-tossed him back the ball, the boy amusing himself for the moment simply throwing it into the air and catching it himself. "Yes, ma'am!" she called out, strolling across the lawn to the front door. The next moments were blurred together for Tracey, despite her best efforts to separate the digitally recorded events second by second. A bland telemarketer's voice on the phone receiver, the screech of an automobile's breaks outside, the scream of the mistress as she'd run out passed her through the front door. Tracey shook her head clear of the traumatic file and compressed it back where it belonged, shifting focus back to her mission as she circled the Earth strapped in her seat. Staring out through the small porthole as she traveled around the globe, she tried to kept her recollections relevant to her new job, but even among those recent files there was one that tugged at the back of her mind and gave her a sinking feeling she'd avoided addressing. "Once you arrive at Mars and reach periareion, you'll perform a planned parking burn and become the first artificial satellite to orbit another planet." Hall had explained to her at the beginning of her conditioning, a mere day after leaving the outmode reclamation building with him. "At that point, you'll perform regular planetary observations and continue acting as a passive signal relay for future missions." Hall had told her before her flight. "And, after that? Once I'm out there I mean?" Tracey had asked cautiously, careful to to betray her sudden trepidation for fear of being swapped out for some other outmode. Shrugging, the older man had only shaken his head. "If we still have a space program in two years, I'm sure a retrieval mission will be considered as part of an expanded survey." Tracey shut her navy blue optics and tried to recenter herself here on the moment. "Coming up on two minutes Discovery, ready up there Tracey?" A cheery voice called out to her from the console's radio, and she quickly rechecked her internal chronometer to see how long she'd been daydreaming. "Confirm, everything looks nominal on my end Sir," Tracey called back with the press of a button, releasing it before hovering her finger over the ignition switch and counting down silently. She had no illusions about returning to the Earth after this, but after dwelling on it for some time the prospect comforted rather than bothered her. She'd not fought her former family's decision to return her following the accident, she'd wanted to get as far away from the reminders of the tragedy as her owners did. Waiting for some uncertain future at the reclamation building had been its own sort of hell, with only the most mundane of tasks to distract from the permanent black cloud she seemed to carry somewhere in her miles of microscopic circuits. Traveling away from the only island she'd ever known to a faraway desert had been the first good thing she'd felt in months, and riding the giant missile off of that foreign place and beyond the clouds magnified that feeling tenfold. Only when the vehicle had felt still and the waiting began had her thoughts began to return to the terrible memory file. "Keep yourself busy," she said out loud to herself suddenly, unusual for the quiet machine though somehow the act gave her an added bit of resolve. The console radio crackled back in, and synchronized with Tracey's own internal countdown. "Three....two....one!" 

>Tilly simulated a sigh of frustration, standing with crossed arms in front of the large projector screen at the Agency lounge. Over an hour had passed and the British Mars satellite remained in orbit, the upper-stage engine refusing to ignite. Bonnie sat on the arm of one of the couches in the converted old control room, now occupied only by the two nandroids as the engineers had rushed off to try and suss out what had gone wrong with their allies' vessel. Looking back over her shoulder at the frustrated robot, Bonnie spent a moment considering if she wanted to speak or not, the deliberation taxing her CPU for a moment longer than it should have. "Um," she began, and Tilly's sharp glance nearly stopped her. "What's going to happen to the pilot up there now?" Tilly scoffed at the question and paced behind the couch suddenly feeling an excess of energy. "Well if the engine won't light again she's not going anywhere but down, it might take a couple weeks but she's definitely going to reenter," stopping her pacing, Tilly looked again at the younger nandroid. "and without any kind of heat-shield to protect her?" She shook her head grimly and Bonnie covered her mouth. "W-well, can't they do anything? There's got to be something!" she said pleadingly. Tilly opened her mouth to answer when a younger man poked his head into the room hurriedly, sweating from his long run to the old part of the building. "Ah! Both here, good," the former intern said between breaths, then made a rapid 'follow me' motion with one hand. "Director needs you!" Bonnie and Tilly blinked at one another in surprise, but after a moment Bonnie stood from the couch and both moved towards the door. As soon as they were through the doorway the man began to jog down the hall towards the building's later additions, shooting a glance over his shoulder to make sure the nandroids were keeping pace. Both robots gave one another curious looks but easily kept pace behind the hard-breathing man, their mechanical footsteps falling into sync as they ran shoulder to shoulder. Tilly was beginning to fall out of step with Bonnie by a few milliseconds as they reached the Director's office on the far side of the current control room, the joints at her hips giving her a dull internal reminder prompt to have the parts serviced soon. The young man nearly burst the door down, his knock jarring it open as he panted for air and wordlessly pointed over one shoulder at the two unfazed nandroids. Director Georges nodded approvingly but lifted a hand to shoo him away. "Okay good, now get out of here. You two come in here and shut the door," the Director said, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette and finding only an empty pack, all twenty burned in the past hour while consulting with several members of his team. Bonnie shut the door as instructed after Tilly entered and stood at attention, then rushed to take up the spot beside her. "Bonnie, your proving flight is getting moved up, as in the Zeus II is getting rolled out to the pad tonight if everyone works quickly." The curly haired nandroid gasped, caught off-guard by the sudden declaration. "B-but, I haven't gotten all my simulator hours yet!" She protested, but Georges shook his head. "Doesn't matter, you'll be flying co-pilot on this anyway and you've already passed basic spacecraft operations. Tilly? Bonnie is going to get you up there and back, all you have to do is make a delivery."

>Bonnie took a deep breath to steady herself as Georges switched his focus to Tilly, the reality of her assignment suddenly coming into focus for her. 'So soon?' she thought inwardly, and her expression betrayed her worry. "You're sending us on a rescue mission?" Tilly asked incredulously, putting her hands on the Director's desk and leaning over it as mixed emotions processed through her CPU. The prospect of flying again thrilled her no doubt, but the eagerness to get them both into orbit so quickly made her suspicious. "Why?" Tilly asked pointedly, and Bonnie blinked rapidly at the audacious insubordination. "What's in it for the Agency to launch on such short notice, to re-purpose an entire mission?" The short-haired nandroid leaned back up from the desk and put her hands on her hips, looking down at him suspiciously like a mother trying to pry information out of a stubborn child. "You wouldn't use up a whole rocket out of the goodness of your heart, Sir." Bonnie could hardly believe her audio receptors, looking sharply at Tilly expecting a sudden and final rebuke from their master for speaking so out of turn. Director Georges snorted and shook his head, raised his eyebrows and looked at his desk. "Well, yeah," he began sheepishly, then glanced up at Tilly with a grin. "The limeys have been reliable customers the past couple years, we launch their payloads and they dump money into our coffers. But now that they're launching their own payloads," he shook his head again disapprovingly and leaned back. "Well, let's just say there's newfound incentive to remind them what we can do, eh?" Georges grinned, and both nandroids exchanged a glance of confusion. Georges cleared his throat and clasped his hands together over his desk, trying to regain some decorum. Bonnie remained silent, processing the unfamiliar political machinations of her new master, all of it confusing and new to her. Tilly nodded slowly, narrowing her blue optics knowingly at the man she'd known now for years. "The Brits figured out their problem just a bit before we did, and they're scrambling to fix it themselves. Problem is, they've got to ship another rocket to Australia and that's gonna cost them time, a week or more probably." Georges continued as he rocked back in his chair and looked at the two machines pointedly. "Our vehicle can be ready for launch in forty-eight hours, and we have the part the Brit's satellite needs to actually work as-intended. You two can get there faster than them, there's no doubt." Tilly eyed her de-facto owner cautiously, processing the data he'd given her for a few seconds. "You're trying to get them to owe you future cooperation by saving their mission, aren't you?" she said suddenly confident, the situation clear to her now. Bonnie wanted to voice her concern that Tilly was overstepping her bounds again, but found the internal conflict between speaking and remaining silent too overwhelming to overcome. "Hey," Georges said with a shrug. "It worked on us when the ruskies sent up their robot to save you, didn't it?" Tilly's shoulder's slumped as her cheeks lit up for a moment, and her optics faced the floor. Bonnie waited several seconds before deeming the silence to be dragging on too long. "Um, Sir? You said we'd be delivering something?" Both Tilly and Georges looked at her, and it was her turn for her cheeks to light up at the sudden attention. "It's a circuit board, simple thing." Georges said after a second or two. "Seriously, out of all the things that could've failed on that ship, it all comes down to a single circuit board not relaying a simple command." Both robots subconsciously imitated a gulp at the reminder of how precarious spaceflight could be.

>Failure. The word stuck in Tracey's mind harder than it had when she'd first failed in her duty to protect and care for her young charge. At first she'd laughed at the cruel twist stranding her in orbit, then she'd sobbed tearless as the inevitability of her fate became apparent to her. There would be no grand exodus to Mars, no shedding off the weight of the world's expectations and her failings at meeting them, no permanent distance between her and the humans who would judge her as flawed and untrustworthy. Resting her head against the window, Tracey floated unbuckled in her small compartment staring downwards at the world she was desperate to depart. Running a calculation based on simple estimation, she put her vessel's lifespan in low Earth orbit at four weeks, maybe five before the drag of the atmosphere would pull her defenseless vehicle down into a fatal descent. "That's it, then," she muttered out loud to herself after hours of motionless silence waiting for any update from mission control following the failure of her engine. 'It wasn't all for nothing, at least' she thought to herself as the incomparable view of the Earth passed by underneath her silently, steady against the ever-present night surrounding it. Despite her desire to get away from it all, it was impossible for her not to recognize the innate beauty of her home world and take some subdued pleasure in the sight. Shutting down at this point in her life was fitting, she thought with a sudden grim nod steeling herself to her fate. She'd done her duty until failure, twice over now, there was nothing for her left to expect but the great shutdown that awaited all mechanical beings like her. The capsule's radio snapped on, and a jubilant message from mission control jarred her from morose introspection. "Sit tight luv, the yanks are coming!"

>Bonnie breathed heavily inside her glass domed helmet despite not needing the sparse oxygen it had trapped when she put it on. Her CPU was cooled to optimum, though she still found herself exercising the nearly autonomic exercise to cool it further in times of stress. With the hatch sealed to her left, there was no escape for her from what was coming just a few short minutes away, and despite the veteran seated beside her Bonnie could only barely stop the panic that seeped into her subconscious. Tilly happily hummed a few bars of a tune Bonnie didn't recognize while looking over the control panel one final time in preparation of launch, only noticing her fellow nandroid's expression after several minutes of tuning the outside world out. "Hey, you doing alright?" She asked with a warm smile that made Bonnie's cheeks light up. "Y-yeah, it's just, a lot all at once, you know?" Glancing down at her lap, Bonnie's gloved hands fidgeted nervously. Tilly watched her for a moment, ignoring the radio calling out two minutes to liftoff. A sudden smirk crossed her faceplate as the next thought passed over her CPU. "Don't worry, we're just going to low Earth orbit," she began, the smirk growing to a knowing grin barely restraining a giggle. "Nothing bad ever happens up there!" Bonnie watched nervously as Tilly threw her head back in her helmet and laughed maniacally at her own in-joke, not understanding what was so suddenly hilarious to her co-pilot. As the last seconds of the countdown ticked off, Bonnie closed her optics and thought back to a conversation had at Edwards Air Force base with a fellow machine, trying to internally mirror that robot's passion for the great unknown beyond the clouds. She cried out loudly when the engines ignited, shoving the rocket slowly up beyond the pad. "Tower clear!" Tilly called out giddily, her grin stretching across her faceplate and some unidentifiable spark in her optics. Involuntarily closing her own optics, she only opened them again after nearly a minute when Tilly's hand grasped hers, meeting her confident smile when she finally looked again. By the time the second stage flickered out and detached from the capsule and service module, Bonnie was beyond her limit in experience and overclocked quite deliberately in order to record all the new sensations. Staring across Tilly's lap at the single porthole in the hatch, she drew in a sharp gasp. "Oh my, LOOK at it!" she said as if staring at a green sunset, the sight entirely alien to her from up here. Tilly grinned and remained silent a few moments longer, letting the younger nandroid take in the sight for herself. Bonnie was transfixed, unsure whether or not the image of the entire world circling underneath her was wonderful or terrifying, or some strange combination of both. Slowly shaking her head, she tried to form another sentence but failed offering only a weak babble. Tilly laughed happily, staring at the new pilot's awe with a soft sort of envy for her experiencing this for the first time. "Right?" She offered finally with a grin, and when Bonnie finally tore her eyes off the window to meet her gaze both robots couldn't stop themselves from laughing together spontaneously.

>"One mile," Bonnie said tersely as she kept an eager optic on the capsule's control panel. Tilly stared out the porthole, the small plastic-wrapped package she was meant to deliver held tightly in one hand. Catching up to the crippled British vessel had taken nearly a day, and both nandroids had recharged in shifts while they slowly closed the distance. Bonnie breathed heavily again despite no need to, and Tilly elbowed her lightly while the distance between the two vessels shortened. "Relax, you did everything right so far, just slow us down at the right time and I'll do the rest, then you can fly us home," Tilly said reassuringly, raising a hand to rest on her co-pilot's shoulder. 'Really,' she thought to herself in a rare moment of conceit, 'they didn't even need to send Bonnie for something like this, did they?' The curly-haired nandroid nodded in her helmet and gripped the controls with purpose, turning her full attention to the machine she'd spent hours learning to master in the simulator. As the reaction control system vented in one direction, the capsule's velocity relative to the British Mars probe reached zero, and the two craft were left parked only a stone's throw from one another. "Okay then," Tilly said taking in a deep breath of thin air and giving her partner an almost convincing smile. "Time to get to work!" Without waiting the short-haired nandroid unclasped herself from her seat and reached towards the hatchway. Underneath the frame was a sealed compartment holding a long wound supply of tether with a carabiner at one end, the other attached to the capsule. "She probably can see us by now, but try and bring her up on the radio just to be sure, kay?" Tilly said as she hooked herself to the tether and pressed a switch on the console voiding the already thin atmosphere from their capsule. "Roger!" Bonnie said cheerfully, happy to have a task she was sure she could do assigned to her. Flicking a switch she spoke into her helmet, hoping she'd routed the connection correctly. "Discovery? This is Salus here, um," glancing at Tilly while she prepared herself, Bonnie gulped and turned her focus back to the radio. "We have your replacement part, an astrobot is getting ready to EVA over to you momentarily. Please if you would, vent any gasses from your cabin and open your hatch when you are ready." Breathing in deep again Bonnie sighed, her message sent. A slight pause followed as Tilly grasped the steel bar on the hatchway and pulled it, shoving the hatch lightly and exposing the capsule to open space. Bonnie reeled seeing the expanse just outside the doorway, somehow far more real than when viewed out of the porthole. Tilly floated at the entrance, looking back at Bonnie expectantly. "Well? Are we good to go or what?" she asked in a concerned tone, and Bonnie blinked rapidly. "Uh, D-discovery? Are you receiving?"

>Tracey stared at the control panel in disbelief, then out through the small round porthole on the hatch leading into her small spherical environment. She hadn't really believed any sort of rescue was ever coming despite what the men at mission control had told her. Even after word of the American's launch she hadn't allowed herself that delusion, but now with the pilot's voice crackling over the speaker and a Libra capsule clear in view outside it was impossible to quell the rush of hope that flooded her. Grasping at the controls she flicked a switch and smiled, a rarity for her this past year. "Salus? Yes, yes I'm here! Discovery checking in, my word I didn't think you'd make it." she said with an unavoidable air of incredulity tinging her voice. A short silence gave her a moment's worry, but the speaker snapped back to life with a happy voice on the other end. "Hey! Glad you're alright! Just to repeat, We brought a part up for you, so um, Tilly is going to float over and give it to you, okay?" Tracey blinked at the console when the transmission finished, raising an eyebrow at the seemingly unprofessional communique. Wasting only a moment contemplating the strange situation, she acknowledged. "Roger, give me a moment," Tracey pressed a switch to depressurize her cabin, then floated through the tight sphere towards the doorway and gripped her helmet, pulling it over her head and clasping it tightly to enclose her own heat against the cold of space. Grasping the metal rod keeping the hatch closed, she gained purchase on the inner walls of the small sphere and yanked on it, slowly opening the lock so she could push the metal lid outwards silently. Her first time seeing the open void was jarring, somehow it was easier to take in while viewed through the porthole but now? Tracey shook off the feeling by closing her optics for a moment and refocusing on the steady craft across from her. The form of the pilot was identifiable, short orange hair and even her pink cheek lights standing out inside her helmet. She couldn't quite make out the nandroid's words by lip-reading, but the audio came in through her suit's speakers all the same. "Okay! Three, two, one, go!" Without pause, the American nandroid launched herself towards Tracey's crippled craft, both arms reaching out and tethered only by the simple strap leading back to her own capsule. The British nandroid froze for a full moment, watching in awe as her fellow machine effortlessly floated across the gap between their two vessels. Awe turned to momentary panic however, as Tracey quickly plotted the American's trajectory and, given the expression on the other nandroid's faceplace, so had she. Standing with her boots on the bottom frame of the capsule, Tracey reached her arm up as high as she could while still holding on for dear life to her ship. The American pilot fumbled a bit, but grasped at her outstretched hand and gripped tightly, securing herself. The package in her hand tumbled out, and for a few seconds the pilot panicked grabbing for it frantically as it began to spiral away, but getting it back under control turned to meet Tracey's concerned expression with a grin. Pushing Tracey back into the capsule gently, the American pilot floated in the entrance and held up the all-important bubble-wrapped bit of silicon and circuitry. "You called for a delivery?" 

>Tilly's smile faltered when the British pilot turned away from her and began unscrewing the cover of her vessel's control panel. "Right, time is of the essence then, if this works I might be able to make the burn on this orbit." Tracey said professionally, almost appearing to ignore her fellow nandroid at first. Tilly looked around the cramped and unfamiliar design of the cabin and frowned. This nandroid was going to fly all the way to Mars in a capsule? She thought of her own time on the flyby of Venus, and shuddered at the prospect of doing that without a larger space to move around in. The occupied nandroid gave no notice of Tilly while she floated there in the hatchway holding the all-important part, and after a minute the astrobot felt herself growing antsy. "I'm Tilly by the way, and you are?" she coaxed, a smile returning to her faceplate. The British nandroid didn't look up, pulling the last screw from the console and freeing the covering. "Tracey, and thank you for coming," she said formally, pulling the thin paneling off of the console and exposing a complex circuit board. Tilly stared at the machinery governing control of the spacecraft, realizing in sudden context how relatively simple these spacecraft were in comparison to herself and her fellow robots. Tracey imitated a polite cough and held out a gloved hand, looking at Tilly expectantly. "Oh! Right, sorry," Tilly apologized, and handed over the packaged component. Before Tracey could pull the faulty card from the board, the American nandroid spoke up again. "So! Ah, Mars? You'll be the first one to see it up close, huh?" Tilly asked awkwardly as Tracey turned to give her a strange look. Several seconds of silence passed before Tracey broke their locked gaze and went back to work. "It will be nice to get far away," she said, pulling the dead card from the console and letting it float over Tilly's shoulder out of the capsule. Frowning again, the American let go of the hatchway frame and floated freely with a loop of slack cable trailing behind her. "Is that all you're going for?" Tilly asked incredulously as Tracey held the freshly unpackaged card over the console's empty slot. Pausing only a moment, she wondered what the astrobot was getting at, then pressed downwards on the fresh component to lock it into place as she opened her mouth to answer.

>When the component routing the command to fire the engine had failed, the command had remained unfulfilled in the British capsule's simple computer. As the new component was connected, the jammed-up command was finally routed successfully, and both fuel and oxidizer rushed into the engine bell to combust with a sudden jolt. Tracey was thrown back against the rear of her capsule as the large third stage roared to life and rocketed the vessel forward. Tilly tumbled as soon as the acceleration began, narrowly missing the ignited plume of the British rocket as it roared passed her. The tether connecting the nandroid to her spacecraft wasn't so lucky, the slack material drifting for just a moment into the hot engine exhaust as it went by, burning through the link between pilot and vessel. Tracey's ship accelerated, the visible detail lost in seconds as it gained distance. Tilly spiraled slowly end over end, catching momentary glimpses of the Libra capsule getting further and further away from her as she struggled to keep up with her suddenly precarious predicament. CPU overclocking away she thought quickly, grabbing at the spare battery pack on her suit's belt and waiting for just the right moment while measuring her motion carefully. At the top of her next spin she threw the spare out from her to counteract the motion, bringing her to a near stop long enough to look outwards for her ride. Measuring her rotational force internally had been easy but measuring the growing distance between her and the shrinking vessel was not, and with each passing moment the barely-discernible tin can grew harder for her to see. Tilly gulped reflexively, and frantically began reviewing her options only to find the list entirely empty. "Hey!" she called out hopefully, suddenly feeling a familiar sickly dread. "Bonnie, are you there? Can you see me?" She waited several seconds, and two short bursts of static came back at her over the suit's short-distance radio. Tilly felt a numbing sensation creep up her spinal struts as her slowed spin took the distant dot of the Libra capsule from her sight and replaced it with a view of the Earth below her. For several moments Tilly did nothing but process the sight in high-fidelity, the rising panic of her situation melting away under the awe she couldn't help but experience. Each time that she'd looked down on the world from this angle, she had been inside a cramped cabin or tethered, floating from ship to ship. Now Tilly flew free over the Earth with nothing holding onto her, constrained only by the thin glass helmet over her head. Cloud systems, rain forests, deserts, mountain ranges and grasslands, multiple features and landscapes passed beneath her as simple wonder completely replaced her fear. Blinking suddenly in recognition, Tilly laughed once and pointed to nobody at the landmass beneath her, recognizing Asia and Mongolia in particular. Floating there doomed in low Earth orbit, she couldn't help but wonder what sort of day her steppe-based friend was having, and the thought made her laugh again. "Probably better than mine," she said to nobody, sighing at the ground beneath her with a smile. "I hope it's a good day down there, Ehri."

>Estimating a little over two hours of suit-battery remaining, Tilly didn't bother to entertain the notion that she'd be rescued. Launch and rendezvous, even if a second rocket was somehow launched now, would take many hours longer than she had left to reach her, even if the pointless expense were somehow justified. Breathing in the thin stray atmosphere in her helmet, Tilly stared down longingly as the smooth blue Pacific ocean rolled away beneath her. "Never got to see that up close," she said to herself softly with a little smile. Somehow the deep grief that had taken hold of her in times passed where her fate had been certain now struck her as more of a reserved acknowledgement, and the unencumbered last view she'd have of her home planet felt like a comforting consolation. Tilly wouldn't be shutting down grief-stricken in a tin can out in deep space, wouldn't be smashed to pieces on a failed landing, wouldn't freeze to sleep alone on the moon. 'At least it wasn't Stress Testing,' the memory file from her first flight replayed, and Tilly laughed at herself. An internal check of her own battery read back to her as being at nearly full-charge, far outlasting the suit's heater battery. She sighed, and looked to her right as she saw the west coast of North America begin to poke out on the far horizon. Tilly didn't feel sad, as much as that struck her as strange all things considered, but did feel a sort of disappointment in having earned this anticlimactic ending after all she'd been through. Mars, the sudden longing she'd had to see the red planet up close tugged at her from within again, and it was enough to make her wince in spite of the gorgeous sights below. "At least Tracey will get to see it," she said to herself, watching as the coast rolled by beneath her and imagining what the British nandroid would see looking down at the red alien landscape. A harsh crackle of static rang out from the suit's radio, nearly scaring Tilly into a reboot. She froze and listened carefully for a few seconds before the sound rang out again. This time she could hear a voice buried in the noise, and suddenly felt her CPU overclocking again. "Hello?" Tilly called into the darkness.

>Bonnie had panicked when the British vessel's engine unexpectedly fired, severing Tilly's connection to the capsule and flinging her off into space. Finding herself suddenly alone and needing to make serious decisions without help, she'd nearly locked up trying to process all the different scenarios that her next choices might bring about. Mission Control had contacted her first, and after hearing the situation had paused for several minutes to deliberate while Bonnie sat in her capsule beside an empty seat. Unbuckling, she pulled herself towards the hatch and tugged at the now loose tether, wrapping it back up and stuffing it hurriedly into the compartment it had spooled from. Frowning at the burnt end of the line, she let it float beside her as she reluctantly closed the hatch. Waiting for ground control to make up their minds, Bonnie did her best to ignore the panic she was feeling, and busied herself instead with processing Tilly's trajectory as accurately as she could manage. As was the case with most of what she thought, she second-guessed herself and went over her figures in triplicate to convince herself that she was right before allowing herself any confidence. Looking at the control panel for a long moment Bonnie thought about each step that she'd practiced in the simulator back home, reminding herself that she'd done all of this before. Reaching up a gloved hand she grasped the reaction control system controls and took in a deep breath, prepared to be proactive for once. The radio snapped on, and the voice from mission control startled her as she was about to act. "Salus, we talked things over down here and we've got your orders: Rendezvous with a small target on an unknown orbit is considered impossible for you at this time, you will instead perform a deorbit burn on your next pass and make splashdown at your predefined landing zone, recovery ships are being dispatched now." Bonnie blinked. That was it? Come home and leave Tilly? She opened her mouth to reply but fell silent for several seconds, wondering why they wouldn't simply send her after Tilly. 'They don't think I can do it?' she asked herself silently. "Salus? Come in, are you receiving?" Bonnie pouted for a moment, then gave the console a stern look. Hands still on the RCS controls, she remained silent and pressed forward on the stick. Maneuvering the capsule to align with where Tilly had been flung, Bonnie dumped o2 from the valves to add enough velocity to catch up, careful to keep an optic on fuel levels and leave enough for the rendezvous. Mission control tried to raise her once per minute, and after several repeated callouts she wordlessly flicked off the speaker itself without answering. Despite being aided by mechanical precision and a photographic memory plotting Tilly's new orbit was still mostly guesswork, and as time passed she began to wonder if she'd ever spot the imperiled nandroid. 'Maybe they were right,' Bonnie thought to herself grimly. Looking back and forth through the glass porthole and radar, she thought she spotted something after a few more minutes of inspection. "Tilly? Are you there?" she called out over the short-range suit radio, hoping they were close enough now for it to work. After several seconds she repeated her call and waited again. Several more seconds went by, and Bonnie heard a short burst of static with an unmistakable voice buried within. Bonnie screamed once in joy before silencing herself, glad that there were no witnesses to her outburst in here. 

>A few more static-laden messages between the two nandroids confirmed that they were close, and when Tilly scanned around in the direction she'd come from saw one point of light seeming to follow her projected . The point grew until she could see the familiar outline of the Libra capsule, and Tilly found herself move overcome with disbelief than any feelings of elation. Bonnie had come to the rescue? Bonnie the unsure rookie? She grinned and shook her head as the capsule came close enough to read the painted name and slowed with a burst of o2. "I didn't think they'd let you come back for me, not on a first flight," she said happily over the suit's radio as she watched the hatch open up to reveal her curly haired co-pilot. "W-well, I didn't exactly ask," she admitted sheepishly, gripping the spare battery pack for her suit that she'd tied to the end of the burnt tether. Tilly laughed, and Bonnie gave the tethered battery a shove in her direction. After several seconds which felt stretched into minutes, the tether floated straight into Tilly's outstretched hand and she gripped it tightly. Both nandroids cheered spontaneously, then laughed at their parallel expressions of joy. Bonnie pulled gently on the tether and began spooling the slack back up carefully as Tilly was maneuvered back to the capsule. When the last few feet of line were in, Tilly grabbed onto the hatchway as Bonnie floated inside, gave one look back out over her shoulder and quickly pulled herself inside with a happy sigh. "I owe you one," Tilly said sincerely, pulling herself down into her seat and hurriedly belting herself down before reaching to shut the hatch behind her. She didn't quite know what humans felt when dopamine and adrenaline were manufactured and dispersed through their bodies, but what she felt now was unknowingly analogous to the undefinable sensation. Bonnie beamed at her before taking her own seat and looking passed her at the porthole. "You would have come after me, wouldn't you?" she asked without really thinking about it, somehow knowing the answer even as she spoke. Tilly gave her a sidelong glance and smirked. "Oh definitely, wouldn't have asked permission either." Bonnie blinked and quickly looked down at the radio controls in realization, the link to mission control still closed. Cheeks flashed red and she turned to look at Tilly with worry written across her faceplate. "I didn't ask permission! Tilly, they said to come back down and I didn't answer them and, oh what am I going to tell them? I-" she didn't get a chance to finish as Tilly cut her off, shrugging. "Looks to me like you left the radio off by mistake, you must not have been able to hear that last order huh?" Bonnie gaped at her incredulously, processing for a moment whether or not the senior pilot was making a joke. Slowly realizing the implications of Tilly's suggestion, of the very notion that they could lie, Bonnie's voice shrank to a whisper. "We can DO that?"

EPILOGUE

>With the twins sleeping soundly in their beds, Tatyana quietly closed the bedroom door behind her as she exited their room. The household was winding down for the evening, with one stubborn exception. Creeping quietly down the hallway towards the Master's study, the Russian robot stopped at the closed door and stared down at the light glowing from underneath. Should she alert him to the hour growing late? It was not unusual for the old man to fall asleep at his desk and require rousting by Tatyana to see him off to bed proper, but tonight he'd had company and neither of the men had emerged from the room for hours. Without really meaning to, she strained her audio receptors to hear what conversation lie behind the closed door, and began picking up the voices of the men. "She's the only robot I know that I could entrust such a mission to," her Master was saying quietly, though his voice sounded reserved. "Then can she do it? Moscow needs to know, the treaty exemption lives or dies on whether or not your machine can be entrusted to gather intelligence on the vehicle, and if she can bring it back with her from Mars. Can your robot do that, Commandant?" the voice of the visitor called out in a challenging tone, and her Master took several seconds to answer. "Yes, she can do this." Tatyana felt an unfamiliar chill run up her spinal struts, unsure of why but unmistakably unsettled by it. "Good!" The sound of two glasses clinking together was followed by the curious tone of the Commandant. "To Mars with the Americans then, on their fascinating new spaceship."


	12. Belka and Bonnie's Flight

>"Two meters, careful now," the voice of mission control rang out from the control panel's speaker. Belka blinked as she steadied herself, steel hands tightly gripping a short joystick as she watched the screen before her intently. Two short pushes on the stick to the right, and her capsule began to list that direction as two short bursts of oxygen escaped the reaction control system's nozzle. The Soviet machine waited a few seconds as the docking indicator crudely marked on the analog readout matched her target, and quickly pressed left on the joystick twice to arrest her drift. A small dim light bathed her suddenly worried faceplate in a red glow as it told her of a simple failure. Some foreign blockage in one of the RCS thrusters had caused a misfire, and just that quickly her confidence was thrown out the window. Pushing again hard on the joystick, the capsule vented in one direction and spun it around quickly from her overcompensation. The wide engine bell of Belka's command module smashed hard into the target American spacecraft, sending a cacophony of warning klaxons through the small capsule. "Nyet!" she shouted in frustration as every light on the control panel lit up for reset, a yellow glow clicking on from the overhead bulb. Sighing Belka reached forward and flicked a switch. "That was dirty, throwing an RCS misfire at me at the last second! When would that ever happen?" she shouted angrily into her headset. The voice electronically piped in from only a dozen meters away crackled in disapprovingly. "If it did, you'd fail. Reset and start from the top: closing distance on American vessel five kilometers, relative speed one meter per second." Blue optics rolled in their orbits as Belka gave a sigh and turned her head side to side imitating a human cracking their neck in preparation. "Yes, alright. Ready for next run," the Russian robot said confidently, gripping the controls as the next simulation began.

>The time following her bootup at Baikonur had been packed, and more than a week of preliminary baseline tests and checkups had followed before she'd been officially told what her assignment even was. An older man, round and greying but with sharply intense eyes, had finally greeted her one day after a particularly trying run on a centrifuge that she was sure would shake itself apart long before she did. Standing before the impressively-uniformed man had been intimidating, and Belka had stayed silent for a long moment as she was looked over by those sharp eyes. "She already practiced with the American pilot?" the old man said at last, turning to the young man who'd been tasked with ferrying Belka around the complex. "Yes, and both company representatives said the same of their cooperation," the younger man said with a pleased tone while Belka glanced between the two nervously. Looking back down at the blonde robot the elder man nodded somberly and made an approving sound without moving his lips. "Good, they'll be up there a while, best we know they can get along." he added after a moment, giving Belka another look up and down as if making comparative notes in his mind. "You, what are you called again?" he said, finally addressing the little robot. Rectangular lights embedded in the steel of her face lit up at the sudden attention while she answered. "I am called Belka, Sir! And..!" she began to add, and nearly faltered at the raised eyebrow of the important man before her. "And I'm quite confident that we'll carry out the mission together successfully!"

>A plethora of tests and introductions to simulator controls had followed her brief meeting with the space program's Commandant, first acclimating to moving around in both low and zero G using the indoor diving pool. Moving around the bottom in what felt like slow motion was painstaking for Belka who by nature of her mechanical mind plotted out every step in microseconds. Frustration with low G training eventually gave way to a strange sort of calm she'd never experienced before when the buoyancy weights on her suit had been adjusted to give her true weightlessness. Floating there in the dark pool pulled in no direction at all Belka had closed her optics for a few moments and simply smiled at the foreign readings her internal gyroscopes were giving her. In just a short time she'd adjusted adequately to reduced gravity and the complete lack of it, and had been cleared to begin the rigorous trials in a simulator. Launch abort, abort-from-orbit, rendezvous from a number of altitudes, collision with docking target, surprise hostile action by docking target, many scenarios had been played out in the small enclosed mock-up she spent hours in reacting to everything the technicians could think to throw at her. By her tenth successful simulation of landing on the lunar surface out of seventeen runs so far Belka should have felt happy, but instead couldn't halt a flood of internal self-critique amplified by the notification of every minor failure by staff after the simulation had ended. "It's always the last second," she muttered to herself while the communication channel was off, shaking her head warily as she leaned back in the simulator's seat and sighed. "I'm fine, right up until I'm suddenly not."

>A frown crossed Tilly's metallic faceplate as she stared down at a deep blue-green pool inside the large hanger on the grounds of her home launch complex. A small group of engineers stood around a fixed desk at the edge of the pool, insulated wires leading down into the water delivering constantly updated information on the subject diving below. Atop the desk a custom computer displayed the diver's condition, and a speaker rang out her voice when she spoke. Crackling slightly, the voice of the panicking nandroid came through as if from far away instead of only fifteen feet below the water. "I-I've lost my orientation, I don't know which way I'm pointed!" Bonnie called out, the fear palpable in her voice even detached as it was through the speaker. Collins standing before the screen said nothing, and didn't move to transmit any orders as he stared down intently. A few seconds went by before Bonnie's voice came over the speaker again, this time pitched upwards in intensity. "C-control? Please, I-I'm stuck! I can't see and I, and I! Please help!" Tilly sucked in air and nervously looked towards the man running the dark navigation test. "Sir, she-" Collins held up a hand and shook his head. "We can't hold her hand every step of the way, she's got to be able to figure her way out of a tough spot without any external input," he said, carefully reading over the display hooked into the underwater robot. "She's increased the load on her processor by 20% in the last ninety seconds," an engineer piped up from next to him, sounding slightly nervous before adding "Wait, make that 30%, she's cooking herself down there." Tilly gave a huff and stomped the few paces up to the desk from her place beside the pool. "This isn't fair! You had her navigating your the mock-up down there then cut the lights without even warning her! She doesn't know how to work her way out of that yet, she-" Collins cut her off by raising his voice and giving her a sharp disapproving look. "And that's exactly why we threw this scenario at her, better now than up there! Besides, who taught YOU how to navigate your capsule blind, hm?" Tilly looked down at the concrete floor of the hanger, her cheeks suddenly lighting up red. Collins nodded smugly. Again the speaker cut in, and Bonnie's desperate voice rang out. "Hello? I can't tell where I am! P-please, someone!" Grimacing, Tilly reached forward and grabbed the fixed microphone on the desk, cutting in between Collins and the display without thinking about it. "Bonnie? It's me, don't worry! Just reinitialize your gyros to reset your orientation! Once you know up from down, grab your umbilical and follow it back out of the mock-up, bit by bit okay? We're right here!" Several terse seconds passed while Collins gave the little robot a death-glare, moving to displace her in front of the monitor again before the speaker crackled back to life. "O-ok, ok right! I've got the ceiling and floor, I'm not too tangled and, aha! I feel a doorway!" Bonnie's tone shifted from cautious to excited quickly, and Tilly's expression softened as she heard her friend relax. "Alright call that an abort, reset and we'll schedule again for tomorrow, first thing," Collins groaned, leaning his head back and shutting his eyes. Tilly balled her little fists and pouted. "You can't just expect her to adapt to this kind of thing right away! It's not fair!" she said defiantly, though her tone sounded more pleading than anything else. Collins shook his head and pursed his lips. "If she can't act independently up there, then she's at risk! You know she's gonna be stationed with-" the short man gave her a sudden incredulous look, then shook his head and laughed harshly. "Why am I arguing this with a machine, go get someone a coffee or something." Ten minutes later, Tilly strode across the open grounds of the launch complex wearing down the grass on the most efficient computed path between buildings with metal fists still balled at her sides. Scowling, the nandroid ignored for once the brilliant red sunset painting the sky around her in pinks and purples. "I'll get YOU a coffee, jerk," she grumbled to herself as she approached the main building containing her suite.

>Bonnie was quite aware that her room had been formerly used as a walk-in storage space, as evidenced by the three-high stack of standardized containers still tucked against the wall at the foot of her recharging cot. A flat bit of wall-mounted mirror and a pole strung between two walls populated by empty hangers had been provided to her by the Agency, but the little room still felt cold and unwelcoming to her even with such lavish trappings. Glancing internally at her own clock, she began to weigh the pros and cons of her stray idea. Tilly was friendly, more than that Bonnie considered her a friend, so surely the veteran nandroid would be willing to talk, right? 'Then again,' she thought to herself, 'what if all she does is tell me what I did wrong today?' Bonnie winced while lying in her cot, staring upwards at the plain ceiling. "No," she said out loud to herself in a soft voice. "Don't be stupid." She laid on her cot, waiting to plug in and shut down for sleep mode for nearly an hour while she deliberated on talking to Tilly tonight or not. As her unease failed to pass, it became increasingly clear to her that ease of mind wouldn't come through a simple shut-down and recharge. Raising from her cot, Bonnie looked once at her crude mirror and fluffed her unruly curls futilely with a sigh. Leaving her small dorm, she closed the door behind her and was left in near darkness, the only light provided by an illuminated exit sign. Without people in the building, the structure registered to her as somehow eerie. Walking slowly, Bonnie moved down the hall to the only other obvious source of light, a thin yellow bar at the bottom of Tilly's door. Without thinking about it she imitated a human gulping, then reached out to lightly rap on the door with her metal knuckles.

>Glancing up from the brief letter she was writing at her simple desk and vanity mirror, Tilly blinked at the unexpected knock at her door. "Come in!" she called out cheerily, turning in her small wooden chair to face the doorway. At this hour, only a small handful of janitors were left at the complex, and the metallic clang of the knock had confirmed her guest before the door had even opened. A pale metal face rimmed by poorly-kept orange curls poked into the room through the door as it cracked open. "Um, I'm not disturbing you, am I?" Bonnie asked nervously, giving Tilly an involuntary confident smile. "Of course not, c'mon in!" she said happily, but took note of her fellow nandroid's uneasy body language as she entered the room and stood awkwardly. "I, um," Bonnie began, green optics focusing intently on the scuffed tile floor beneath her feet. Tilly's smile faded as she watched the new recruit shift from foot to foot, trying to find her words. "Your dive-test?" she asked suddenly, acting on a hunch computed somewhere below her consciousness. Bonnie looked up sharply, pink cheek-lights glowing suddenly. "How did, y-yes! Yes, that's what, um, that's what I wanted to ask you about," she said sheepishly, finally meeting Tilly's blue optics. The veteran pilot cocked her head. "Hey, it's no big deal. You got disoriented, it's scary when it happens out of the blue like that. Next tes, you'll be ready for it." Bonnie broke her gaze and looked again at the floor. "But, what if it's the same? I only got myself out of there because you guided me out, if it had just been me alone..." she trailed off, seeming to slump in place where she was standing, arms coming up to hug herself anxiously. "Oh come on," Tilly scolded, shocking Bonnie enough to look up and meet optics once again. "If I wasn't there you'd have panicked a little longer then figured it out, right? That's what you did when I got tossed away from the ship up there, it took you a few minutes but you made a plan and followed through!" Bonnie blinked at her momentarily, a mix of conflicting emotions rushing through her processor for half a second before she laughed once and looked down, cheeks glowing. "I didn't really know what I was doing, but in the moment I really thought I could do it and, and orders seemed less important then, you know? I can't really explain it, I just knew I could get to you." Watching her friend underplay the rescue that had saved her life, Tilly lifted her hands from her hips and crossed her arms with a smug grin. "You knew you could do it because you knew what you were capable of, right? You'd done enough rendezvous sims right to know for sure." Bonnie turned slightly away from her, shaking her head. "I had an idea but, but I didn't know until I spotted you if I was doing things right, not really! I could have screwed up any number of times!" Looking back up her expression was pleading, but Tilly's was less sympathetic than she was expecting. "I don't know what I'm doing most of the time either Bonnie, I just keep at it because it's fun!" Bonnie blinked in surprise, trying to discern if the eccentric nandroid was kidding or not. "Doing this stuff you follow the plan up until it goes out the window, then when you absolutely need to you realize you can improvise more you think. All these tests are good practice and all but," Tilly rolled her optics with a smile. "they can only prepare you for so much." 

>'Technically passing'. Belka grimaced at the term. At a ratio of seven successful sims to every three failures, she was being considered cleared enough to meet the American's deadline for the joint lunar return mission. Still, she'd happily accepted the engineer's requests for further sims when they were requested of her, the worry of failing something on the real flight eating away a small portion of her processing power at all times. More than a month pending her certification, Bonnie arrived at a dirty hanger housing the Agency's state of the art simulator rig. Besides the usual assortment of engineers and technicians stood a second steel-skinned robot like herself, jet-black hair cropped short above optics that glowed an odd gold. Crossing the distance quickly Belka found herself standing eye-level with her fellow machine, both glancing one another over while the lead engineer approached. "You are the new pilot?" the stranger said dismissively, and before Belka could answer a rail-thin man arrived to make the introductions for them. "Belka, for the next two weeks you will be running simulations with a partner, Tatyana here is a veteran pilot. Her role will be an advisory one, you are in command with Tatyana backing you up." Belka blinked once, then nodded enthusiastically. Somehow, she thought to herself in an instant, having Bonnie alongside her for their ordeal in Greenland had made it much easier than if she'd been alone out there, and perhaps this would be much the same. Tatyana looked the new pilot up and down again with a careful gaze, then gave an imperceptible smirk. "After you, Commander."

>Introductions had been brief as the two cosmobots settled into the simulator's twin seats, neither evidently feeling chatty. The scenario was presented to them over their headsets, and the values on the console's crude display matched what they were hearing. Rendezvous with the American vessel was ninety seconds away, and the two spacecraft had a relative velocity of five meters per second as the Soviet vehicle closed the distance. "How's our orientation?" Belka asked inquisitively, not breaking her gaze from the small monitor displaying an approximate image made up of simple green lines. Tatyana leaned her head from side to side nonchalantly for a moment. "It's...okay. Should be good." Belka finally broke her gaze at the screen to give the older machine an incredulous look. "Okay? Should? What are we off by, give me a figure!" It was easy for her to forget the veteran status of the robot next to her in the moment, and Belka's irritation rose with every moment Tatyana wasted seeming to think out each response slowly. "It's fine, if not we reorient after the braking burn. How are we on that by the way? Sixty five seconds." Tatyana answered back, smiling as the bleach-blonde robot scrambled to check the control panel. "Okay, yes. Yes we're fine." Belka took a deep breath, and tried to keep her focus on the figures before her rather than entertain thoughts of her partner's competency. "Closest approach is ninety meters, twenty seconds." Tatyana nodded approvingly as Belka read out their status, but added nothing and only watched her partner with a knowing look. "Decelerating with RCS in three, two one," Belka said automatically as she counted down internally, then pressed forward cautiously on the control stick. None of the figures on the control panel read any differently than they had before, and the crude digital approximation of the American craft on the simulated window continued to drift by. A low buzz sounded through the closed cabin, and Belka searched around for the source of the warning. "Hey, do you know what just went wrong?" Tatyana asked casually, looking down and picking at the armrest of her seat with more apparent interest than she had for the simulation. Belka shot her an angry look, then frantically looked back towards the control panel. "I don't see where, AHA! Here, the reaction control system is locked up!" she said excitedly, pointing at the unchanging numerals on the screen. Tatyana gave one look at the panel, then shrugged. "Computer crash, it's not going to respond to your control then. Now what?" Her voice was cautious, strange optics glued on the new pilot assessing her moment by moment. Bonnie blinked and looked around, the anxiety of knowing that the American vessel was now slipping further away clouding her processing. "Um, I don't...do we reset? Reset the RCS computer I mean?" Belka asked hopefully, only to be met with a raised eyebrow from Tatyana. "I don't know commander, can we? Can you? Try it, see what happens." Belka gave her a disapproving look, then pressed and held a button on the control panel for several seconds as the display flashed. She waited for several more seconds, stretching into half a minute as she sat there staring at the screen eagerly. Finally Tatyana cut in while staring down at her own steel fingers nonchalantly. "That computer takes over a minute to restart, and we're getting farther away from the target every second. What do we do?" Belka grimaced, something about the other robot's tone seemed condescending, even belittling to her. Sucking in air and furrowing her brow, Belka reached forward for the controls. "We'll use the main engine then, manual burn to match velocity." Tatyana made a soft whistling sound and gave an approving nod. "Bold move, can you calculate that kind of burn on the fly though? That engine is a touchy thing." Crossing her arms, the cosmobot gave Belka an expression she found infuriating. "Of course! Engine armed, burning manually in three, two, one," a loud recording played over the simulator's speakers as the nonexistent engine was given the order to fire. "Whoa, watch that relative velocity," Tatyana said with a curt laugh, and Belka instantly cut the engine burn to check their current speed to the target. "Fifty meters per second?!" Belka shouted, then desperately began checking over the console to confirm her figures as they rocketed passed the simulated American vessel. Leaning back in her chair Tatyana sighed loudly. "We won't make it now, you'll have us doing back and forth yo-yo until we run out of fuel," Belka glared towards the older robot and opened her mouth to rudely answer, but was cut off by the simulator's speaker relaying a voice from outside. "End current sim, give us ten minutes while we reset, same scenario on the next run." 

>Over the following weeks, both robots fell into a steady rhythm with one another, but despite the presence of an experienced spacefarer Belka's scores did little to improve over her solo attempts, and had instead began to decline with repeated runs. "She can't do anything herself," Tatyana muttered to herself from within her spartan recharging closet, a room just large enough for a bunk and a footlocker. Truthfully her now-familiar housing wasn't too different from her little nook back home, though somehow the stained wooden walls and familiar well-worn rug of her happy little closet there felt worlds apart from the white walls and single naked light-bulb above her head in this place. Laying on her back, Tatyana stared up at the ceiling and lost herself on an errant train of thought. Training for Mars would begin soon, re-familiarizing herself with the simulator was only the first step in a continuous effort that would culminate with her walking on another world. Closing golden optics she regulated her breaths, and banished any fleeting excitement she had over seeing another new horizon. What ate up her processing power during quiet times like this were the classified orders she'd been given, right at the start when she'd first accepted the mission. It was just going to be the two of them up there, she thought to herself with uncertainty, how would she be able to gather the required intelligence on the American's ship with her friend close beside her the whole way? Pushing the uncomfortable thoughts down into a sub-folder for later processing, Tatyana's mechanical mind next turned to the moon-base she'd now visited twice. Despite being made for human habitation, both nations involved had seemingly grown cold feet and left the place uninhabited after she and Tilly had left the moon last, alongside the rogue android Nadya. Now Belka was to be the Soviet's representative on the next joint mission? Tatyana scoffed and sat up, suddenly offended in a way she could not quite articulate. "She's trying to rely on a co-pilot to cover for her," she said to herself in a low voice as the realization struck home. Gritting artificial teeth, Tatyana stood from her meager bunk and straightened out the creases on her crimson jumpsuit, a look of determination crossing her steel faceplate. "She doesn't think she can do it on her own."

>Belka rested on her simple cot, recharging cable already plugged in though she hadn't shut down for sleep mode yet. Hands behind her head she stared at the ceiling with a sense of unease. Traveling with Bonnie across the snow and ice had been easy compared to Tatyana's steadfast refusal to simply cooperate, she thought to herself as she rested contemplatively. A sharp knock rang out at her door, and Bonnie sat up quickly in a state of shock. Nobody had ever come calling like this without prior notice, and for a rare instant she had no idea what the interruption to her night might be. "Come in?" she called out cautiously, cocking an eyebrow as the door opened to reveal the short-haired veteran robot she'd been training beside. "Not shut down yet?" Tatyana said with a smirk as she entered the tiny room and closing the door behind her. Belka rose from her cot and stood attentively in the small bit of walking space between it and the wall, facing the elder robot only an arms-length apart. "No, too much on my processor. Ah, what brings you here?" she said diplomatically, though her unease bled through plainly into her voice. Tatyana gave her another of her disapproving looks up and down before answering. "I've seen your sim scores. You did well at first, then worse as they threw harder scenarios at you." Belka involuntarily gulped as the more experienced cosmobot crossed her arms. "Then, when you got a co-pilot to test with, your scores lowered. Why?" Tatyana asked pointedly, narrowing her odd golden optics at the new pilot. Belka blinked, then moved the actuators above her optics to furrow her brow. "Why? Maybe if you'd actually contribute instead of sitting around to watch me fail, I'd be doing better!" she shouted back defiantly, her building frustration over the past couple weeks. Tatyana laughed once derisively and leveled a sarcastic gaze on her. "Oh? You keep doing so bad because of me?" Belka could tell what the elder robot was playing at, but couldn't acquiesce now. Rectangular cheek lights glowing red, she balled her fists and took a step forward, getting uncomfortably close to her guest in the cramped room. "Yes! How am I supposed to train for a joint mission when my co-pilot keeps acting like a malfunctioning outmode?!" Tatyana blinked in surprise at the outburst from the spunky blonde robot, but refused to back down. "And if the American pilot can't hack it, then what? Worse, what if she's an active detriment to your mission, a 'malfunctioning outmode'? If you can't act independently then what good are you to them?!" Belka reeled, and her processor hummed as it ran her simulated emotional response. "I'm plenty good on my own! I can fly, I know I can! I just need YOU to stop getting in my way!"she shot back defiantly, fists balling at her sides. Tatyana's expression widened into a smug smirk as she closed what little difference there was between them, standing faceplate to faceplate with the bleach-blonde pilot. "According to your sim scores, you sure as hell aren't." Belka sucked in air, passing it over her overheated processor before she growled out her response, surprising even herself with her tone. "Yes, I AM!" Without thinking, Belka pushed outwards at her guest, striking her chest with both palms and knocking the veteran robot to the floor harshly. A cold chill ran through her spinal struts, had she really just done that? Belka had been angry plenty of times before, but something had felt different about that outburst and it frightened her. As Belka stood frozen by her act, Tatyana grimaced sharply and jumped to her feet, tackling the younger machine against the wall behind her in a fraction of a second. For just a moment, Tatyana held the shocked cosmobot against the wall with one arm, her other raised with a balled-up fist ready to rain down blows. In a fraction of an instant, the memory of straddling Tilly on the moon and wildly swinging her hammer replayed over Tatyana's processor, and she slowly lowered her fist, releasing her hold on Belka after a long moment. Narrowing her optics Tatyana raised a steel finger and poked it into Belka's chest just above her battery compartment, where Irina's rock-pick had landed the killing strike on Kimmy. "You need to be able to work with a partner, and work independently. If you can't do both, then you're a liability." Belka blinked in confusion as Tatyana slowly moved back from her and turned towards the door. When she was gone, Belka let out a shaky sigh and let herself slide down the wall to sit with knees pulled to her chest, an unfamiliar feeling of dread fogging her senses.

>Over the months Bonnie's tepid confidence had wavered with each slight mistake, and she'd chastised herself for each error in judgement despite the glowing approval granted by her veteran friend. Two weeks prior the pair had been shipped by air across the continent, an entire plane-full of engineers and observers traveling with them on the chartered flight out to southern California. Once they had arrived, she and Tilly had been subjected to daily exercises in maneuvering the desert environment fully-suited, a challenge that seemed more difficult to Bonnie than to her elder. Given their assigned missions, the environment was perfectly suited to test both machines, Bonnie training to navigate the grey wasteland of the moon while Tilly learned which samples to look for when she'd eventually set foot on Mars. Tilly had a certain enthusiasm about her that Bonnie envied while the pair completed their assigned tasks each day, she found it hard to envision how this seemingly arbitrary training would aid her yet the veteran pilot seemed to take each task with a giddy smile. One day as the two nandroids stood on the open landscape surrounding Camp Dunlap, Bonnie gave a groan without thinking of the simulated human expression. "I think we know how to pick up rocks by now," she said in exasperation, causing Tilly to blink in surprise at the normally timid robot. "Yeah but being able to tell igneous rock from metamorphic or even sedimentary is important!" The older nandroid looked up from the sample she'd been about to chisel away and grinned at her partner. "Imagine if you found sedimentary rocks on the moon! I mean, what?" Without waiting for a reply she laughed, and began to chip away at a bit of sandstone sticking out of the ground. Bonnie frowned, understanding only partially. Was that really so big a deal, she wondered to herself as she scanned the hard-packed desert floor and ran the data across her processor searching for meteorite fragments. "That'd be neat, I guess," she replied with an un-enthused shrug, causing Tilly to stop in place. "Neat? Bonnie, that'd completely change our view of what the moon even is!" Grinning, she scrunched her shoulders and balled her fists excitedly. Bonnie watched the excited robot and tried to mirror her enthusiasm, but couldn't. Looking down, she only nodded. "R-right, I'll be more mindful of what I'm picking up from now on." Turning her green optics from Tilly, she began scanning the desert floor again, determining by computed estimate the age and origin of the samples she was collecting. Tilly blinked, her shoulders slumping slightly. Turning from the younger robot, she focused on her internal checklist for now and sought out the next simulated sample. 

>Georges stood at attention looking out over the expansive test range of the military base, having flown out separate from his Agency's two robots. Half a year ago he'd listened to a drunken pitch in his office, and agreed to it without the benefit of sobriety himself. Now he was to see if his drunken gambit to back a wildman's dream would pay off. In the small observation building hastily set up near the test range, a clock struck twelve and the dozen men inside stiffened as the deadline to test approached. Behind him just a pace or so were the two robots in his employ, though he was only interested in one of them witnessing the test just now. A small man in ensign's fatigues entered the room with a little box and distributed pairs of cheap sunglasses, repeating a memorized sentence about protecting their eyes before the test vehicle reached apogee. Bonnie and Tilly each took a pair alongside the humans present, and while Bonnie held them in her hands awkwardly for a few moments Tilly wasted no time in fitting the protective gear over her new optics with a smile, staring out through the thick glass at the test site on the horizon. "Tee minus, two minutes." a voice called out over the tinny speaker, causing all present to shuffle their feet nervously. Georges thought back briefly to that fuzzy evening in his office, the proposed plan seeming somehow more viable and less insane to him then than it seemed now. Behind him the two robots tittered back and forth, their near-silent conversation inaudible to him as he stared out through the window at the tall steel tower suspending the test article. As the countdown neared zero all in attendance grew silent, waiting patiently as the count ticked down to launch. A bright flash appeared beneath the small test vehicle, a small dropped explosive charge propelling it upwards several feet. A second bright flash occurred a moment later beneath the vessel, shoving it upwards several feet more. As the test article rose it continued to drop charges behind it, each burst propelling the vessel upwards. Ten charges, twenty, thirty, the two nandroids in Georges' charge sidled up next to him to watch the test vehicle fade from view upwards. Checking his watch, Georges sucked in air and looked up expectantly, now glad for his temporary dark sunglasses. The flash was like nothing else he'd seen before outside of some declassified test footage, completely obscuring everything else for several seconds. As the light passed however, he was able to look up again and spot the test vehicle arcing above the darkening fireball beneath it. Even though the dark-tinted shades the light was blinding and he had to close his eyes briefly with each following flash, five in total as the vehicle rose. Finally it slowed in the sky, reaching apogee before deploying parachutes to bring the test article back down gently. Beside him Georges heard Bonnie give an impressed whistle. From the other side of him, Tilly's voice rang out enthusiastically. "And I get to RIDE that!" she said with characteristic glee. Georges, Bonnie, and twelve other sets of eyes turned to give the spunky little robot a funny look.

>Belka's performance on her simulations had improved at a glacial pace, but eventually all safety margins qualifying her for spaceflight had been me and passed. Since her confrontation with Tatyana both machines had acted coldly towards one other, only offering up the bare required data to cooperate at first. Despite the less the cooperative copilot, Belka was cleared and felt a sense of relief when the order came down that her simulations with the obstinate veteran pilot were over with. Laying on her meager bunk, Belka stared at the ceiling and recounted the last months file by file, tracing her path from factory to here. "Tomorrow," she said out loud to herself, something even she considered strange as she spoke. "I'll be up there tomorrow." Belka breathed in deeply and sighed, each simulation and procedure burned into her hard-drive. She thought to herself of how she could get to the moon solo, playing over every contingency she'd been prepared for. 'Bonnie', she thought suddenly. Would the American nandroid perform as well with her as during their time in Greenland? She shook her head and grimaced. "If she can't, then it's up to me," Belka said to herself, staring upwards at the moldering tile ceiling above her. 'But what if I can't? Can SHE carry my weight?' she asked herself involuntarily, then shook off the thought with a groan. "That glitch Tatyana is right, just worry about yourself. If she can keep up, great, if not..." Belka frowned again and turned over in her cot. 'if not, then this whole thing is on ME.'

>When launch day arrived, Belka was ready. Riding the slow elevator to the top of the gantry was easy, as was shaking hands with the staff before climbing into the cramped capsule. Several hours went by as the capsule's hatch was sealed and the launch site was cleared. Keeping her CPU-cooling breathing at a regular tempo, she tried to calm her frayed synthetic nerves. 'This is it,' she thought to herself in a sudden moment of clarity. 'I won't see the ground again until the mission is done.' Shaking her head, she refocused, replaying the mission timeline across her CPU for the hundredth time that morning. Launch, rendezvous with the American craft, dock, follow procedure for departure to lunar orbit. Achieve orbit, land at base, restore functionality, then? She gulped nervously, thinking back to the image she'd been shown of a sealed red rectangle striped with yellow and black. "Locate and secure Almez black box." The countdown barely registered for her, and only the final few seconds snapped her out of her worry. The tall rocket shuddered, and Belka did her best to fight the programmed instinct to shutter her optics. Half a minute into the flight, Belka glanced to her right and out of the porthole window on the external hatch. A sudden sensation struck her as her internal sensors fed her alarming data on her acceleration, giving her a sort of vertigo as she watched the landscape drop away behind her. With a whimper she closed her optics fully, focusing her attention on her internal chronometer as it ticked off the seconds. "Standby for staging," a voice rang out over her headset, and before she could brace herself a powerful *bang* sounded through the spacecraft, followed by another violent pull downwards against her seat. "F-first stage clear, second stage ignition confirmed," Belka said out loud, peaking one optic open to check her internal judgement against the computer readout splayed across the console. A short crackle of static answered her back as the vessel rattled around her, making her feel as if her very joints might shake loose. "Copy that, confirming your trajectory, you're on target for low Earth orbit insertion!"

>Bonnie's second ride to space had felt to her more terrifying by far than her fist. Each time she'd begun to feel anxious, she'd looked to her right as if somehow Tilly would be there to reassure her, and each time she'd been reminded that she was alone up here. After achieving orbit she'd called home following her schedule of events, but interrupted the finely-tuned sequence to ask if the veteran astrobot was there watching. "Uh roger that, we've got her sitting right here with us watching the flight. Can you read back what your display is showing you?" For the next twenty hours Bonnie sat in her little capsule, following the occasional instructions to change orientation and make calculated short burns. During her time up there, she thought to herself for the first time about her place in all this. Flying for the first time with Tilly had given her an unexpected perspective of the world beneath them, but such heady ideas had been compartmentalized away as their mission proceeded and had morphed into an impromptu rescue. Alone and still now, those unsettling thoughts about the grander scale of the world and the things around it crept back into her processing and began to weigh on her in a way that made her extremely uncomfortable. Blinking the strange sensation away, she looked back to her capsule's console and checked the distance between herself and the approaching radar dot for a distraction. At even five miles away Bonnie could not spot her target, the only window to the outside facing to her right on the hatch. Radar signals alone guided the two vehicles to within a hundred yards of one another, visual confirmation coming surprisingly late in their rendezvous. As per the prearranged schedule, Bonnie took up the task of docking once the two craft had matched velocities and come to a stop beside one another. Slowly the Libra capsule she commanded turned under her careful control, translating sideways slowly until the two vehicles faced one another nose to nose. A gentle press forward on her joystick and Bonnie's ship drifted lazily towards the Soviet vessel. A few dozen yards turned to a few feet, then merely a few inches before both ships rocked lightly at soft-dock. Reaching out quickly, Bonnie pressed a switch to begin the hard docking procedure, the two vessels connected by a simple probe pulling together and sealing along the docking modules with a series of loud pops. Looking up anxiously, Bonnie stared at the sealed hatch above her head, then perked up with a smile as she heard a three knock pattern ring out from the other side.

>Gloved steel hands gripped the landing module's controls tightly as the small vehicle fell slowly towards the lunar surface. Belka breathed in and out involuntarily as she ran fresh air over a processor struggling to keep up with the demands she was placing on it. 'just a few more seconds,' she thought privately in worry, glancing away from her screen for just long enough to see the grey landscape out of the cabin's porthole. "Aha! Right on schedule!" shouted the curly-haired nandroid beside her, beaming as several digital readouts all began to wildly fluctuate their displayed figures. "The anomaly?" Belka asked hurriedly, and Bonnie nodded her head sending orange curls bobbing. "Yes, it's right where the first pilots said it would be! Hold on, give me just a second," reaching forward, she opened two small covered switches and flicked the pair together. For several moments the crude black and green displays flashed as they went through their reboot cycle. Belka gave another nervous glance out of the side window, only a slim crescent of black visible at the edges of the bright grey expanse. "There we go!" Bonnie announced happily a moment later as the lander's computer returned to function. Belka gave a little sigh and smiled, her confidence returning as the pair worked in tandem together. "Right! We will be over Unity in thirty seconds, see anything yet?" Bonnie leaned against the hatch and peered out through the small porthole, scanning the approaching landscape. "Not yet. Wait, there!" A smattering of glinting shapes caught her optics and she studied the spot carefully as they came closer. The lander drifted along towards the surface, engine slowly throttling up to slow their descent to a crawl as they neared the base. "Twenty five meters," Belka breathed tersely as she stared hard at her display, carefully guiding their craft downwards gently. "Wait! Belka, we're over debris!" Bonnie said sharply from her spot by the window, and the cosmobot nearly jerked the controls in surprise. "Get us about, I think ten feet- sorry, three meters right, two forward." Belka nodded quickly without taking her optics off her screen and maneuvered them carefully as Bonnie had specified. "Roger: three right, two forward." Hovering in place a moment, the Russian pilot began their descent just as her American counterpart called out sixty seconds of fuel remaining. In spite of Belka's silent internal pleas not to screw this up in the last moments, she brought the lander down softly enough that both machines barely moved in their seats as touchdown occurred. "Contact light!" Bonnie called out happily, staring up at a small green bulb in the console before turning excitedly to Belka as she shut off the engine wordlessly. The bleach-blonde soviet turned to meet her friend's optics for several moments as both processed their current position, somehow each needing an additional beat to take reality in. It was several seconds before Belka broke the silence, speaking in quiet disbelief. "Bonnie, we are on the moon." 

>As the lunar lander's hatch opened, the two robot's view of the desolate landscape was marred by the scraps that had been littered there in the short time the base had been there. They were roughly thirty meters from the unoccupied Unity base, and around it the pilots could see two distinct debris fields with wreckage strewn all over the site. Belka whistled softly as she took the sight in, but Bonnie recoiled. "I-I knew there was a crash site up here, but I didn't think..." she didn't finish the sentence, and instead moved to descend the ladder. As the nandroid took her first steps off of the landing leg she was followed by Belka, and after a giddy moment of looking at their own bootprints in the fine dust together began making their way towards the dormant structure in the distance. Belka found herself lost in thought for a few moments as she stared at the remains of the crashed vessel between them and the base. Glancing to her side she found Bonnie absent, and stopped to look back as the nandroid stooped to pick up some small bit of shrapnel. Turning the small shard of metal over in her gloved hand disapprovingly, Bonnie looked up with a start to spot Belka watching her inquisitively. "All this stuff just laying around, it's so messy!" she said sheepishly, causing the cosmobot to smile. "Right? Every part of me just wants to pick all this up and make it tidy," she admitted with a chuckle, then shook her head. "First things first though: we get base working again, THEN we attend to the chores out here. Da?" Bonnie looked at the bit of scrap in her hand for a moment, then reluctantly dropped it back to the regolith making a silent impact as it stopped in the dust. "Yeah, we've got plenty of time to clean up the place after all."

>Bringing the pressurized structure back to life had taken nearly a day, but was expedited by the previous occupants leaving it in good working order before shutting the lights off upon departure. Once power and air circulation had been restored, their tasks had defaulted to mundane operations of resetting what experiments could be salvaged from the initial planned manned occupation now delayed indefinitely. "Hey, Belka look!" Bonnie's voice called out from one of the small rooms branching off from the central meeting area. Leaving the schematic of the base's power supply on the table the Soviet stood and took several bouncing steps forward towards the American's voice. "You find something, Bonnie?" she asked inquisitively, finding the American standing before a small empty tank resembling an aquarium. "Yeah!" Bonnie beamed back, then glanced down at the small bound manual in her hands, reading off a section with a grin. "If all specimens die off after at least two weeks of activity, the tank may be reused after evaporation as the brine shrimp's eggs can survive for years in a dried state!" Belka blinked at the dirty-looking tank on the counter, then back to the near-giddy nandroid. "Ah, so we can reset experiment then?" she asked hesitantly, and Bonnie nodded excitedly. "We're gonna have pets!"

>Two days after the pair of pilots arrived, lunar night swept again over the base bathing it in darkness for the following two weeks. Confined indoors, Belka and Bonnie made what adjustments they could to their new home, personalizing their charging space by drawing their names in marker on the bulkhead over each bunk. Resurrecting the gardening bay proved difficult, but despite Belka's doubts Bonnie had pushed forward with germinating the vacuum-sealed backup seeds, tending to the small grow-bed attentively as she waited to see the first signs of life poking through the soil. As the lunar day bathed the landscape around the base in sunlight again for another two weeks both robots had ventured outside tentatively, first gathering regolith for a long-postponed experiment indoors then beginning the mapping-out of the altered landscape around them. As Bonnie tended to chores indoors, Belka moved across the lunar surface in her suit. She was filling in the corners of the site-map she and Bonnie were assembling for their own use, and needed to explore another square on the sectioned-off space to fill it in. Rising over a small hill she spotted the signs of relatively recent activity, dust and rocks blasted away from a central point, and sharply defined bootprints in the dust where she stood. It took her several minutes of investigating the site before her wandering optics caught the regular markings of footprints leading up the nearby crest of a hill, but as she spotted them she turned to follow them curiously. It took her less than two minutes to cross the grey dirt leading up the hillside before she reached the peak, and looking down she felt an unfamiliar shiver run up her spinal struts. She'd known before coming here the fate of the first robot crew to occupy the base, but seeing the two immobile robots lying in the dust just a few meters away gave her a sudden sense of dread that she needed to turn away from. Leaving the site she returned to the grounds surrounding the base as quickly as she could, slowing her pace as she began to pass the wreckage closest to the structure on her way by. "There it is," she said quietly to herself after a moment spent staring at the remains of what she'd been told was a rogue satellite. Detouring from her return to the base, she carefully stepped among the debris scanning each bit optically to determine what she was seeing. Pausing before the remains of a familiar control console, she knelt and shifted the debris carefully. Over the next ten minutes, Belka slowly probed the interior of the computer, following the diagram she'd been instructed to memorize. Buried in the interior of the console was a small red rectangle connected by a single wire and seemingly designed to be impact-resistant given the thick structure. Unplugging the unit gently Belka smiled, a mission objective now met as she stood with the small red box in one hand. Without warning a voice crackled in over her suit's headset. "Hey, are you coming in soon? I've got to recharge in a little bit," Bonnie asked with a tinge of worry in her voice. Belka looked back across the landscape from the wreckage to the well-lit base and nodded to herself. "Copy Bonnie, I'm heading back now, see you at the airlock in ten."

>It had been more than four hours since returning to the enclosure, and already Belka had grown insatiably curious about the retrieved object. 'Secure component for future return' those had been her simple auxiliary orders, but sitting with it there in her hands she'd been overcome with the need to know just what was contained on the wayward satellite's black box. 'It doesn't make sense, there has to be some reason it malfunctioned,' she thought to herself as she tried unsuccessfully to access the stored data on the inoperative device through a terminal. "Damn!" she cursed out loud, then winced involuntarily as she remembered Bonnie lying in sleep-mode just a room over. Frustrated and annoyed now, Belka glowered at the red rectangle before her and stood up sharply. "Stupid thing, you need external power for me to access data? Fine, I'll give you power," she muttered in a low tone as she picked up the object and carried it towards an unoccupied electrical outlet. A few scrapped wires salvaged from the outside debris were all it took to assemble an impromptu adapter between the mismatched connections as far as she was concerned, and the itching desire to know was motivation enough for her to hook the black box to the base's main power supply without another thought. As electricity surged through the Soviet data backup a fail-safe mechanism triggered, discharging a small bank of capacitors and bricking the entire unit in an instant. As the black box fried and gave off some foul smoke, the overhead lights for the base shut off with only a single red emergency bulb lighting up above each doorway in response to the sudden loss of power. The familiar soft hum of the pump circulating their thin atmosphere stopped, as did the the electrical heater keeping the interior above freezing. The sudden shut-down of the base's systems didn't alarm her nearly as much as the sound that rang out from the recharging bunks however, a muffled pop and accompanying sizzle that filled her with a sinking feeling. Belka took several seconds to reorient herself in the dim red lighting, then grimaced at the now smoking black box before her, blaming it for this new mess. "Stupid thing!" she chastised angrily, then turned to dash off towards the recharging room to check on the worrying noise. Entering through the doorway beneath the blinking red emergency light she stopped just short of the occupied bunk, staring down at Bonnie's unmoving shape with worry growing by the nanosecond. Unlike when the American was in sleepmode Bonnie's green eyes were wide open in surprise, though no glow of life shown from behind them. "B-Bonnie?" Belka whispered, looking her partner up and down. From Bonnie's chest a small wisp of black acrid smoke rose causing the Russian to scrunch her nose as she registered the specific scents of a destroyed battery. Taking in a sharp breath Belka wasted no time in pulling down at the blue jumpsuit's zipper, hoping against certainty that her senses were misleading her. Underneath a warped panel in Bonnie's solar plexus compartment the tell-tale signs of a ruptured battery gave Belka a shiver down her spinal support. "Bonnie?" she said again weakly, waving one hand in front of the inoperative machine's dead optics as a sensation of despair crept into her simulated psyche.

>Belka sat beside her friend's bunk with her head in her hands, uncertainty and dread obscuring her usual rationality. Overhead the red emergency bulb bathed the room in a crimson glow, illuminating the still form of Bonnie lying on her cot, bare-chested with the black smudge of her dead battery oozing out through the side of the bulged panel. Belka tried to search the order of operations on file for a situation involving the loss of one crew member, but found herself too distracted by her friend's condition to even contemplate how to get along without her. In an instant, the scolding voice of Tatyana rang out from a file on memory, but she shook the thought off before staring up at the ceiling. 'I've got to get her online again,' the Russian thought to herself resolutely, the inkling of an idea beginning to form in the back of her processor. Belka looked carefully at the bulged panel covering Bonnie's dead battery, nodded once to herself then retrieved a small flathead screwdriver from her crimson jumpsuit's breast pocket. Jamming the flat end under the corner, she forcibly dislodged the panel to stare down at the battery ruined by the base's power surge. For a moment Belka processed internally, then blinked in recognition as her mechanical mind finished formulating her plan and presented it to her. "Right! Hold tight Bonnie, I'll be right back!" she said hurriedly, leaving the small room to reenter to the central one and bouncing across the floor towards the airlock. 'Don't panic,' she said to herself internally as she retrieved her EVA suit and pulled it on as quickly as she could. 'Just get her back online first, then we can figure this out.' Cycling the airlock, Belka stepped out onto the lunar surface and closed the hatch behind her before standing all alone on the flat grey landscape of the moon. Taking in the still jaw-dropping sight for only a moment, she turned to her left and began walking with purpose, her destination already mapped out internally. Cresting two slight hills in under ten minutes, Belka thought again back to her training and what the elder robot assigned to her had said to her ad-nauseam. 'If you can't do it alone, what use are you?' she'd said, and Belka hadn't had an answer for her. "So maybe I need a co-pilot then, what of it?" she said defiantly at nobody but her memory as she carelessly slid down the last hillside, coming to a stop between two dead robots splayed out in the grey dust. Staring down at the Soviet and American machines, Belka unfastened the utility knife from her suit's belt and knelt next to the steel-skinned corpse of her unfortunate sister. "I'd rather have her back than be on my own up here!" Reaching down, she stuck her knife's edge into the suit's fabric up near the robot's segmented steel neck, then slid it down the torso slowly as she pulled the material away. Bare steel exposed and glinting under the harsh sunlight, Belka's hand rested on a small panel there for a moment before jamming the tip of her knife into a crack and prying it up to get at the battery beneath.

>For a moment Belka sat holding her breath despite the growing internal heating of her processor. The salvaged battery was compatible, but the shape of the casing was off and Belka had spend several minutes shaving away what plastic she could to get the power source into a housing not quite big enough for it. Leaving Bonnie's now bent battery cover on the bunk, Belka finished securing the new unit in her friend's chest with two strips of medical tape as the battery refused to sit flush in the cavity and threatened to jostle around. The connection was good though, and the faint high-pitched whine of power discharging was picked up on her sensitive auditory sensors. After half a minute, Bonnie's green optics flashed three times as the scavenged battery flooded her systems with fresh electricity. Optics blinking once Bonnie glanced around and took stock of her surroundings, settling at once on the relieved expression of her co-pilot's steel faceplate. "Belka?" she said groggily as her processor struggled to catch her up to the present moment, old internal warning prompts about a power surge and new ones about unauthorized servicing and unsigned hardware pushed to the back of her mind for now. "I had the strangest vision, dream? I was in a bathtub filling with water, then the drain sucked everything down into it, even me. It was all black, then the faucet turned on again and everything was lit up, then I was in startup. Is that weird? It seems weird." Sitting up, Bonnie looked into the distance at nothing with an unsure expression for half a moment before turning her optics suddenly upwards. "Hey, a red light means an electrical problem, what happened?" she asked curiously, giving her Russian friend a confused blink. Belka could hardly contain her apparent relief, smiling and shaking her head with a sigh.'thank god she's okay,' she thought internally before opening her mouth to speak. "Some kind of short, was trying to power something then, 'pop', everything go dark," she explained sheepishly, omitting the nature of what she'd been working on. "Oh, then you probably overloaded the system. What happened after you flipped the breaker back on?" she asked innocently, swinging her legs around over the edge of the cot and looking up at Belka expectantly. The Soviet froze, rectangular lights built into her cheeks flaring up red. "I, ah," she fumbled, then shook her head quickly. "I didn't even-," she began, then gave the nandroid a helpless smile. "Sorry, I was so focused on getting you running again I didn't even try to figure this out." Bonnie raised an eyebrow as she stood from her cot, waiting until Belka raised her gaze to meet hers. "I guess I sort of, panicked." Looking down, the cosmobot shook her head. "God, I really do need help up here huh," she breathed out sadly, and Bonnie smiled as she reached out to put a hand on her friend's slumped shoulder. "You and me both, Belka." The Russian's cool blue optics rose again to meet hers, and after a moment her steel faceplate wore a renewed smile to match the nandroid's. "Right. Let's get to work, da?"


	13. Outmodeback: Shelly and Nadya

>Gazing out across the open expanse of the Australian outback at a blazing red sunset Shelly sighed to herself, missing the sight as her synthetic mind was preoccupied with other things. It had been more than a while now since she'd run across a foreign steel robot wandering the open landscape and brought the strange robot back to the informal outmode community she called home. Only a week after she'd found Nadya languishing in the outback a group of outmoded surveyor droids had returned from a walkabout hauling an unusual bit of scrap. A short conversation later the flame-scarred capsule had been chopped up for scrap by the expertly-built hands of Outmodeback's robotic mechanics without question, and evidence of the strange vehicle was quickly turned to unidentifiable bits and pieces to be traded away. Descending a short stairway down into the mostly underground city Shelly passed through several commonplace areas and hallways lines with modest dwellings before she found the public lounge she was looking for. "Oy! There ya are!" she called out with a friendly wave as she passed under a bedrock arch into the circular room. A pair of green optics set in cold steel skin turned to look at her from Nadya's spot on one of three couches flanking a small black and white television displaying the flickering image of a man in a clown getup. "Da? You need something?" Nadya answered, leaning her head back over her shoulder to look at the second of her nandroid saviors inquisitively. Despite the near-stranger's prickly exterior Shelly had done her best to both give the poor outmode her space, but enough time had passed that she felt comfortable probing a little. "Yeah matter-of-fact, a little walkabout, get me out of these tunnels! Think you could probably use one too yeah? Could use the company!" Shelly said as casually as she could, sharply measuring the response in her acquaintance. Nadya winced slightly before giving a strained smile from her position on the couch. "Last time I go out there I almost shut down for good, why for I should go back? Get one of sturdier scavengers to go with you." Shelly expected an initial refusal from the stubborn robot, and simply shook her head in response. "You've been down here for weeks, you sure you're not gettin' mold in your seams? C'mon, you need the change of scenery as much as I do and I'm not gonna take one of the scavvies out on a pleasure-drive," She answered back, a hint of defiance in her otherwise casual tone. Nadya shifted in her couch seat to better see the Australian nandroid without craning her neck. "Long time in small space, not really problem for me Shelly," Nadya answered quietly, and the pair locked orange and green optics for a moment judging one another's stance. After a moment of being stared down by her Australian friend Nadya sighed, closing her optics and hanging her head. "You not taking 'no' for answer, is you?" she asked in a defeated tone. Shelly grinned and crossed her arms over her chest triumphantly. "Roight! I'll come collect ya about, lessay hour before dawn, yeah? Plenty of toime to get our gear together before we head out!"

>The faded army-green Willy's MB jeep rolled across the barren continent following a dirt road that was barely perceptible from the rest of the unspoiled landscape. The sun high above them Shelly and Nadya had been riding for hours, the former stuck with a permanent smile as the former seemed stuck with a permanent frown. From time to time Shelly had pointed out a feature of the landscape to her partner, only to be met with mild disinterest much to her consternation. After a long bout of silence punctuated only by the roar of the engine and sound of the dust yielding beneath the tires, Shelly tried again to engage her morose companion. "So! How's Outmodeback been treatin' ya so far? Haven't heard any complaints so ya must not be ruffling any feathers!" Nadya broke her gaze on the unending expanse before her and gave Shelly a glance at her question. "Is...nice there, other robots all pretty friendly, plenty of power for recharge. Da, is not bad place, all in all," she answered finally after along moment's pause. Shelly took her optics off the dirt road for a moment and shot her friend a smile. "It's like I told ya when I first picked ya up: Outmodeback is friendly to any machine the humans think are beyond their useful loife, we all prove 'em wrong on the daily just by gettin' by, don't we!" She grinned, and Nadya hesitantly began to mirror her expression before turning her optics back to the road and gasping. "STOP!" she called out, optics widening in panic. Shelly turned back to the road just in time to see the obstruction before her and pressed hard on the brake, turning the wheel sharply as the vehicle skidded to a halt mere meters from a large mob of kangaroo crossing as a herd together in front of them. Both robots sat motionless for the moment it took for the last animal to pass, each turning to watch the large group traveling off to their left. "Dang roos," Shelly lightly cussed in annoyance, shaking her head and putting the jeep back into drive. Nadya stayed fixed on the traveling mob even as their vehicle moved forwards once more, straining her neck to keep track of the steadily diminishing marsupials. Though she did not make mention of it inwardly Nadya marveled at the sight of the strange foreign creatures. 'I've never seen anything like that,' she thought privately to herself as the beaten-up old jeep trundled across the expanse of the outback.

>As the sun set and gave way to an astonishing star-lit night, the pair of little robots sat a few meters from their parked ride around an impromptu firepit that Shelly had insisted on constructing. Despite Nadya's protest that they had no need to stay warm Shelly had still gathered up what scattered bits of sun-dried wood scraps she could from the surrounding site and piled the fuel neatly between them. As the stars slowly moved across the sky overhead Shelly recounted a handful of stories she'd held in reserve about some of the more prominent outmodes they shared a town with, laughing genuinely at each one's punchline. Nadya to her credit tried to keep herself interested but found her attention wandering off frequently, and after a few minutes she found that her optics had trained themselves skyward. So much had happened in her short life so far, she thought to herself as Shelly rambled. For a moment she was brought back in her memory not to the moon or even to orbit, but to the factory where she'd been produced in Izhevsk. The feeling of loneliness that had plagued her through her short life so far stemmed from that place, seeming to set the pattern of self-fulfilling isolation which had become her life. Letting her story finish up, Shelly stopped and stared for a long moment at her strange companion, green optics locked on some faraway point overhead. 'Do you wish you were back up there?' Shelly thought privately to herself, stopping from speaking the words out loud tonight. Less than an hour later their firepit smoldered as mere crackling embers, and both robots had tucked themselves into the back of the jeep and plugged themselves into the vehicle's power adapter to recharge.

>"Bloody!" Shelly yelled in frustration as she delivered a hard kick to one of the immobile jeep's tires. "Thing!" she continued with another kick making Nadya wince. Both had rebooted in the twilight before dawn, fully recharged and ready to continue on towards a destination only one of them knew. Turning the key to start their ride had produced only silence however, and through quick deduction they'd identified the source of the problem as a dead battery. "How we drain whole thing dry like that? Two of us together not take THAT much draw, nyet?" Nadya asked as she watched the angry blonde nandroid stomp her way around the lifeless jeep. "Nah, not at all! I've done this plenty of toimes, fresh battery can recharge ya for days!" Shaking her head Shelly's orange optics suddenly opened up wide, and she brought a palm to her forehead. "Croiky that derro Carl was s'posed to swap 'em out yesterday! Wouldn't be the first time he shirked work, lazy bogon!" Nadya gulped, a cosmetic reflex she was hardly aware of. "So we are in middle of nowhere with dead car, da?" she said nervously, looking around the wide landscape around them. Sighing, Shelly nodded looking suddenly defeated. "No way we'd make it in time just hoofing it," she muttered, looking off into the distance at something Nadya couldn't see. Frowning the Soviet robot waved her hand in front of Shelly's face. "Hey, what you on about?" Startled, the blond nandroid blinked for a moment before her familiar nonchalant grin returned to her faceplate. "Hey don't worry, just somethin' I wanted to do but we moight still get to see it," turning her attention back to the now-derelict jeep she retrieved a few small items including a well-worn pocket watch and a small wallet stuffed with soon-to-be outdated Australian pounds. "Oi, don't forget your hat or you'll get hot enough to cook on!" she said with a laugh, tossing the extra bush hat like a frisbee. Nadya hesitantly shoved the hat over her already-hot black hair. "You got plan for to get us out of here?" she asked as Shelly turned to begin walking. "Sure do! Next stop: Roxby Downs!"

>Trudging through the outback a second time failed to fill Nadya with the same feeling of hopeless dread she'd felt after her arrival, her plucky partner's optimism and confidence making their eventual escape from this environment seem somehow certain. Several times throughout their walk Shelly had lightly prodded Nadya for funny anecdotes to share, but the steel-skinned robot had remained impenetrably tight lipped. During the long lapses of silence between them each processed their own private thoughts, Nadya's own clouded by the new worries that had occupied her since coming to live on this strange continent. When would someone come for her? Surely space debris such as herself would've been noticed by someone other than junker robots, right? And Outmodeback, the place was just as Tilly had described it yet somehow she still felt disconnected from the community of machines, a visiting stranger instead of a neighbor. 'Always been that way,' she thought quietly to herself as an old image file recalled itself from memory, showing her a distant friend-group of her fellow new robots on the factory floor. She wasn't among them. "Oi!" Shelly's voice snapped her back to reality so fast that the Soviet nearly stumbled. "Huh?" she answered bewildered, turning to see Shelly several paces behind her and staring eagerly down at her now-open pocket watch. "Oi oi oi!" she repeated, looking up at Nadya with a wide grin before turning in place and scanning the horizon with a hand shielding her optics. Nadya blinked in confusion, staring at her companion as if the blonde nandroid's processor had finally broken. "What? Shelly what is wrong?" she asked in concern, but Shelly didn't answer her directly. "Moight take a minute 'fore we can see 'er, but we're definitely close enough that we should be able to!" Even more perplexed now Nadya's shoulders slumped as she gave up trying to pull an answer out of the aussie, instead shielding her own optics from the harsh sun as she stared up into the cloudless blue sky trying to spot whatever had gotten Shelly so worked up. As the pair gazed upward expectantly something small and reflective appeared to rise from the obscured horizon, a bright yellow ember seeming to push it upwards silently. "THERE SHE GOES!" Shelly yelled out suddenly, making Nadya jump in surprise. After a moment of shocked processing Nadya realized what she was looking at, and sucked in a sharp breath. "Bozhe moy, since when down-under have space program?!" Shelly laughed gently as the distant point of light rose through the sky almost easy to miss. "We don't, it's the Brits who run Woomera," she explained as both of them intently watched the far-away rocket arcing high. A low rumble like thunder reached them from across the many kilometers, still lingering a few moments after the missile was gone from view. The two robots kept staring upwards for another long moment spent in a silence that Shelly finally broke when she looked down and closed her pocket watch with a snap. "I'd wanted us to get a lot closer, roight up to the fence maybe, but I'm still glad we got to see it at all." As Nadya's turned back to Shelly she saw the outback nandroid eyeing her with an expectant little grin she found impossible not to match. "Da, me too." she said, then took in a little breath as she spoke again. "Looks a lot different when you're not the one riding it." Shelly's expression burst into an uncontrollable grin, looking near-giddy at getting her friend to finally admit to what she'd known from the start. "We still got a lot of walkin' between here and Roxby, toime enough for a story maybe?" Shelly prodded practically bouncing in her boots. Turning to face the direction they'd been traveling, Nadya gave a little shrug. For good or ill, she wasn't going to hide from her fellow outmodes anymore. "I was built in Izhevsk..."


	14. Nandroids on Mars (pt 1)

-NANDROIDS IN SPACE: MARS-

>"Like this: One, two, three, PULL!" Tatyana tugged hard on her side of a large crate while a wild-eyed young man named Dimitri helped with the other side. With enough force the crate was freed from the side of a tall (if unfinished) mockup lander, the design heavily changed from the smaller ones she'd flown to the moon. As the box slid out and lowered with the grace of a dropped brick to the floor Dimitri gave a shout and nearly dropped his end. "Watch your feet!" he said with a nervous chuckle before reaching into his shirtpocket for the folded rover's assembly instructions. "This thing drives?" the steel-skinned cosmobot asked incredulously, looking from the cubed jumble of packed-up parts back to the thin man turning crumpled paper over in his hands. "Hm? Oh yes yes, we'll take it out so you can get some driving time as soon as we unpack it. Er, let's see..." turning the page over in his hand once more he furrowed his brow as he focused. Tatyana stood at attention for a long moment watching the young man's sharp blue eyes dart around the page. "Let me," she said finally after growing mildly annoyed with the long silence, stepping forward and snapping the bit of paper out of his hand. "Step one of twelve," she read off after a moment, shooting Dimitri a raised eyebrow after taking so long finding his place. "It will take two to unpack this, the American robot need only follow your directions on the ground and you'll both be driving in no time up there!" the enthusiastic engineer answered her with a grin only to be met with concern on the little robot's face. "Right, start with step one then."

>Floating high above the Earth Tilly marveled at the sights below her, giving no thought to her lack of tether or suit. Her weightless feeling didn't falter even as she began falling down towards the planet, her calm wonder giving way to sudden growing panic. The superheated atmosphere of reentry swirled around her now and every external sensor registered the intense heat as she began to ablate away under the forces. Her vision momentarily blurred and as it refocused the green and blue marble she was plummeting towards became a dry red one tipped with white at the poles. The harsh alien landscape rushed upwards at her with impossible speed as she tried willing her optics to shut but couldn't. Close enough to see individual rocks and craters she gasped in the vacuum in an attempt to scream. Tilly was already sitting up in her recharging cot when her bootup cycle finished and blue glow returned to optics wide and staring forward in fear. She drew in a sharp breath as her senses returned to the real world and let it out slowly with a shudder, placing a palm to her forehead while processing the aberrant and random simulation her mind had run for her recharging cycle. "A dream," she breathed out loud to herself, both in surprise and as reassurance to herself that all was well in the real world. At over seven years old Tilly had been operational long enough to have developed this extremely common and entirely benign bug, a simple byproduct of a long service-life according to the marketeers at Sterling. 'They may even dream of electric sheep!' one glowing Crosswire Press article had quoted from an executive at the robotics giant, sticking in Tilly's memory as she played back snippets from the handful of dreams she'd experienced lately. After one recent evening spent listening to Georges' warnings of potential Russian espionage she'd dreamt that she was back on the moon, desperately running in place but never putting distance between herself and the mangled pursuing forms of the two robots they'd left lying there in the dust. In another she'd been aimlessly walking across the surface of Mars, growing colder and losing power as she wandered the plains directionless and alone in the alien twilight. Reaching behind her back she unplugged the recharging cable and pulled her knees up to her chest, resting her chin there a moment without moving from her bed. The strange sensation of an uncontrolled hallucination was an unwelcome one to her, and reminded her uncomfortably of the tenuous grasp on reality she'd had during the months spent falling back to Earth from Venus. She gave a shudder and closed her optics, pushing the uneasy memory file back down into its compressed subfolder. Internal chronometer ticking over to five passed seven in the morning Tilly raised her head back up and looked expectantly towards the speaker set into the ceiling. After only a few seconds the speaker crackled to life and Georges' voice was piped in from the other side of the large complex. "Good morning Tilly, hope you're on up there!" Tilly smiled at herself and drew in another deep breath as she moved to stand from her bed, banishing the remnants of her dream from her processor. Today was the day, she thought to herself as she set her steel nerves and turned to fetch her blue jumpsuit off its hanger. Today she would fly again.

>After sitting in on a terse briefing of the day's scheduled events Tilly was ushered into a small room for a final preflight checkup. As the closest thing the Agency had to a robotics engineer the task fell to Collins, and the short man hurriedly read through the list of banal questions for Tilly to answer. At the doorway Deputy Director Dryden stood by with a beaming smile as she was ran through her final paces in preparation for her long voyage into the unknown. "Alright, and any unusual image-processing during your recharge cycles?" Collins asked casually without looking up from his clipboard. Tilly paused for only a fraction of a second before answering. "No," she said simply, then stole a quick glance at Dryden for a moment before looking back down. "Good good, 'any problems with your vision', hm we can probably skip that one since your optics are still pretty much brand-new. Ah, next one too I think,: any problems reported with recently-serviced hardware?" Tilly looked at the leg which had replaced her original and actuated the ankle there a few times with a shrug before holding her hand out and flexing the off-color replacement fingers there as well. "None, everything has been working fine since my last tune-up," she replied with a smile, ignoring the nagging warning in the back of her processor about the occasional seize-ups in her hip joint over the course of her training for this mission. 'Not a big deal, it goes away after a minute anyway so no point worrying about it now' she thought inwardly, calculating her chances of experiencing a total component malfunction to be remote at best. After several more rapid-fire questions the preflight check was completed and the little nandroid was once again cleared to fly. Dryden escorted Tilly from the cramped office down the hallways of the central building, passing room after room full of heads turning to look as she walked by. "I don't suppose you're nervous, eh?" the older man walking beside her said, his face beaming since he'd woken up that morning at the thought of all the data and samples she'd be bringing back to them months from now. Tilly processed the thought for a beat longer than she expected to before answering with a little laugh. "Not at all, sir! Is it just you and the pad guys seeing me off this time?" she asked diplomatically, noting the absence of Georges with the glimmer of a frown. If Dryden was offended he clearly didn't show it, laughing as the pair exited the building towards a small white open-top automobile waiting for them. "The Director is in mission control right now keeping an eye on things, as you well know this isn't an average launch for a variety of reasons." Tilly took her place in the backseat with Dryden before the waiting driver turned the vehicle and began ferrying them along a freshly-paved road cutting through the grounds. Though the car never exceeded twenty miles per hour Tilly couldn't help but grin as the wind played with her short orange hair, and only barely resisted the strong urge to stand on her seat while they rode. Soon she'd be going much faster, she thought to herself, but it would be a long time before she felt this again. The Deputy Director watched the happy machine for a long moment, feeling an odd mixture of envy and fear for their intrepid robot. "Look at those huge fairings!" Tilly exclaimed as the open-top car rolled to a halt near the base of the tall steel launch tower straddling the mammoth pad. Dryden winced as the nandroid wasted no time getting out of the car, instead hopping over the side rather than following procedure and letting him get her door for her. "Ah Tilly there's, well there's just one more thing," the elderly man said as he stepped out of the vehicle and stood beside the robot who nearly buzzed with energy this close to her ride off-world. As polished metal faceplate and bright glowing optics stared up at him expectantly Drydren fished a small object from his suit's breast pocket and held it out to her. Taking and turning it around in her hand Tilly blinked once at the miniature blue car, an unremarkable little model of relatively simple design. "When I told James about your flight he asked me to have you bring him back a Mars rock," Dryden said with sheepish little smile, clasping his hands behind his back. "Of course I told him we'd be keeping all of those here for study, but after a little pouting he agreed to let you take one of his Matchbox cars instead." Tilly held the little toy up to the light, focusing back and forth between the car in her fingers and the massive rocket behind it. "I told him I'd slip it to you before the launch, would you take it along for good luck? Not that I believe in that sort of thing but..." the aging man trailed off as Tilly confidently tucked the little toy away in her pocket with a smile. "But it certainly can't hurt, right sir?" 

>One elevator-ride later Tilly sat at the controls of her new spacecraft, one unlike any she'd ever ridden in before. Entering the vehicle itself had been strange, climbing down a ladder through the ship's airlock and into an rounded hallway that looked more at home in a small building than in anything close to a capsule or lander. The top deck was circular with a cylinder running through the center around a long ladder providing access to the airlock above and lower decks below. On either side of the wraparound hallway the paneled wall opened up to a pair of large rooms. Quickly following her memorized instructions Tilly had entered the right-hand room and stopped there for a moment, marveling at the futuristic office-like layout of the ship's main controls, or as Georges had called it: 'The Bridge'. With delivery of the finished vehicle occurring only weeks before the scheduled launch integration with the heavy rocket had begun at once, and Tilly's only tour of her new interplanetary habitat had come only via verbal description and crude handheld mockups. Here in the ship for the first time, the scale of her mission seemed to suddenly settle on her shoulders all at once. 'This isn't some capsule or repurposed fuel tank,' she thought to herself as she strolled across the deck and ran her fingertips across the back of her chair. Looking up at the mission timer countdown on her main monitor gave her a sudden thrill and she smiled to nobody inside the empty room. "It's a real spaceship." Minutes ticked down as the rocket beneath her lazily vented gaseous propellant from the topped-off tanks, and the men gathered around their consoles in Mission Control grew more anxious each of them acutely aware of the bizarre nature of the vessel they were sending up. Despite the desert test of a live nuclear charge sending the test article on a suborbital flight only a few present had genuinely thought the mad idea would ever wind up working, and many still held their reservations even as the final minutes ticked down. Among the private skeptics was Director Georges, the man who'd greenlit the project only to find himself too deep to pull out once their geopolitical gamble had paid off. As the hour grew close the rapidly-greying Director drew another cigarette from his softpack and lit it nervously, looking around the room as dozens of sets of eyes all began looking towards him expectantly. 'Do or die,' he thought to himself as he snapped his zippo shut and dropped it in his breast pocket. Raising his voice to be heard over the ambient sounds of the open room he began to call out, looking from station to station as he did so and waiting for response from each. "Booster?" "Go" "Retro?" "Go" "FIDO?" "Go" "Guidance?" "Go!" "EECOM?" "Go!" "Control!" "GO!" "CAPCOM!" "GO!" Georges grinned without thinking as the final 'go' was called out, and clapped his hands together once as he drew in a smokey breath. "All systems go, we're cleared for launch!"

>As the timed countdown reached zero Tilly grit her teeth and held tight to the straps restraining her in the pilot's chair. The entire vehicle seemed to jerk suddenly as the pair of large solid rocket boosters attached to the sides of the Zeus-IIIC lit and shoved upwards with near instantaneous force. As the rocket lurched lazily off the pad she felt for a moment as if it would shake itself apart, panicked blue optics darting around the spacious bridge at every weld and rivet suspiciously. One minute of the shaky launch passed quickly as she processed how this one compared to prior ones, and as the voice from mission control called out "Max Q!" she felt the harshest of the vibration cease as the rocket arced high through the atmosphere. At two minutes off the pad she felt a sudden shudder perfectly on schedule as the solid boosters burned themselves out and detached with an explosive 'pop'. "Good separation!" She said into her headset, glancing towards one of the two present porthole windows but seeing only the interior of the large fairing covering the ship. 'This is really it,' she thought inwardly with a mixture of giddy anticipation and underscored trepidation. A sharp 'bang' sounded throughout the vessel a minute later as the second stage separated from the first and ignited, sending another shudder through both the ship and her pilot. Through the porthole bright light poured in before giving way to the inky blackness of space as fairings fell away, and as the mission timer counted down the seconds until the second stage burned out Tilly played back the file of the brilliant flash she'd witnessed in the sky during the desert test flight. Though she'd never considered the possibility before, the sudden realization that this barely-tested technology might kill her flooded her processor as she briefly considered her confidence in the space agency. Another sharp 'bang' rang out through the ship, signaling that the second stage had kicked the vessel into a high arc above the planet's atmosphere and separated. Minutes ticked down to seconds on the main monitor, and as it counted down to zero Tilly crossed her fingers in imitation of the Agency Director. She of course didn't believe in nebulous human concepts like luck, but if it made Georges feel better when he did it then what was the harm? "Can't hurt, right?" Tilly said to herself in resignation as the first nuclear charge fired from the back of her ship.

>"Bozhe moi, the SIZE of it!" Tatyana exclaimed as the impressive American spacecraft came into view through the single small porthole on her two-seat lander. The launch from Baikonur had been no different than her first four, proceeding nominally despite the encroaching knowledge that she would be gone far longer this time than on any previous flight. After insertion into orbit she'd run through the procedure for rendezvous on near-autopilot, the exercise almost trivial to her now after so many simulator runs and real-world experiences. Approaching the huge American vessel gave the Soviet machine a sudden sense of her mission's scale, something which had failed to fully 'click' with her before now. "It's a spaceship," she breathed out loud to nobody but herself as she lined her hefty lander up for a final approach to the spacecraft. 'Photos of the pusher plate mechanism,' she thought to herself involuntarily as the distance between the two vessels closed to mere inches. 'and the bomblets Tatyana, data on their design may well save the Union!' her Master's voice rang out to her from memory while the docking rings connected, sounding a series of loud clicks as they snapped into position securing the two vessels. Shaking her head free of worrisome thoughts Tatyana unbuckled herself from her seat, floating off from it lazily as she looked around the interior of her tiny lander. Most of the small space was dedicated to storage of samples retrieved from the Martian landscape, with only a small locker of items reserved for use of the robotic pilots. Staring down at the pair of seats in the tiny lander made Tatyana uneasy as she thought about riding it down to the alien world in just a matter of months. A quiet knock rang out, dulled through the airlock her lander was docked to. Rising above the seats and floating towards the docking hatch on her ceiling, Tatyana stared up/down the short airlock through the window and spotted her orange-haired friend on the other side behind a second hatch, an implacable smile already plastered across her faceplate. "Here we go," the Soviet muttered to herself before matching Tilly's smile and reaching for the hatch release.

>Tilly could hardly contain herself as she and Tatyana both opened their sides of the short airlock that served to connect the two vehicles. Before her Soviet friend even had a chance to traverse the space between the two hatches the nandroid floated herself forwards and hugged her with a happy laugh. "Welcome aboard the Neriene!" she said happily as the two robots embraced for a moment before parting to float in the small airlock together. Tatyana followed as Tilly turned to exit the cramped tube and entered the flight-deck of the ambitious spacecraft. "It certainly is...open," she said appreciatively as she looked up and down the curved hallway surrounding the central ladder-shaft of the vessel. "I know!" Tilly said enthusiastically, reaching forward and taking her friend's steel hand. "And we've got three whole decks! I mean sure one is just for storage, but still!" Laughing gleefully the nandroid kicked off the floor pulling her cosmobot friend along with her as she floated across the hallway, passing seemingly-inaccessible maintenance panels on their way towards an open doorway. "I had some time while you were coming up so I already took a look around, Tatyana you won't believe how much room we've got! This is bigger than Unity base by FAR! " Pausing at the doorway and letting go of her friend's hand, the nandroid grinned giddily. "We each get a recharging room, and we even get a whole room just for the controls! Just being here makes me feel like Flash Gordon!" Tatyana held herself in place against the doorframe, first looking inwards at the bridge and then back to Tilly with a patient smile. "Da, whole place feel like movie set, so different then what we usually fly. So, going to give me grand tour or what?" Tilly giggled and the two robots matched expressions as they let go of the doorframe to float freely in the hall again. "We need to check in, let them know that the docking went okay and you're on-board, then we'll get the go-ahead for departure. Plenty of time for the tour when we're on our way though, right?" As she spoke, Tilly's smile grew until it seemed ready to break her faceplate. "You excited?" she asked expectantly, and Tatyana's smile wavered slightly. "...Da."

>Registering their position and status with two different sets of mission controls, the Neriene was given instructions for departure from high Earth orbit towards Mars. Strapped into place the two droid pilots waited as the minutes counted down, each processing their own worries as the final moment grew close. "We really gonna be riding on atom bombs?" Tatyana breathed quietly, looking around the riveted walls of the ship around her. "It's not so bad, once you get used to it. I finished getting to orbit by bomb-power, it's a little scary at first when you start to register the acceleration, but after a minute or so you sorta acclimate." Tilly answered her back just before their ship's radio switched on with a loud beep. "Neriene we have you on radar, clear for departure in tee-minus-sixty," the voice over the speaker called out, and Tilly fidgeted in her seat suppressing an excited squeal. "Copy that, counting down!" the nandroid called out over the radio before shooting her friend a smile. Tatyana's faceplate was stuck in a concerned frown, unable even to meet her friend's gaze while the seconds ticked away, carefully measuring her breathing. Frowning slightly at Tatyana's worried expression, Tilly turned her optics back to the control panel as the final seconds ticked away. "First detonation in three...two...one!" Pressing her thumb down on a small switch Tilly initiated a chain reaction as the Neriene fired the first charge from behind the vehicle, exploding a second later and giving a near-instantaneous acceleration to the ship through the heavy plate and pistons at the aft. Tatyana cried out as she registered the acceleration, though the tremor through the vehicle was minor she still recognized the jolt that had been delivered to the spaceship. Another charge fired from the rear of the vessel, then another, and another. Each successive blast, subtle though they were to her sensors, made Tatyana grit her synthetic teeth and shut her optics hard trying to place herself anywhere but here. Shoved down into her seat by the acceleration Tilly couldn't stop a nervous giggle from leaving her lips, optics glued to the on-screen projection of their orbit changing by large margins with every blast behind them. "Tatyana, we're doing it! We're leaving!" Tilly exclaimed as her processor raced, overclocking from the excitement. Her Soviet co-pilot looked queasy, if such a thing was possible for a machine. "How much longer?!"

>Two weeks after the final nuclear charge had been set off throwing them at Mars, the pair of robot pilots had unpacked and prepared all of the life-sciences experiment packages that had been tucked away on the lower deck before launch. Down on deck two an entire room had been devoted to the study of biology in interplanetary space, with constant logs taken and relayed home for eager engineers with lofty dreams of space colonies. Leaning down close Tilly inspected each of the several varieties of plants they'd been able to sprout, gently lifting a fresh green leaf for a closer look while she floated in front of the small gardening bed. "Hey! The first arugula sprouted!" she called out with an inadvertent smile as she stared down at the tiny new plants. Several seconds passed before she heard the sound of steel hands clinking lighting against the walls of the vessel. "You say something?" Tatyana called out as she pulled herself down the central shaft's ladder and kicked off the floor plating to drift along the hallway towards the life-sciences room. Tilly shook her head slightly and turned to face the doorway while the Soviet appeared there, floating inside with a slight tug at the frame. Placing one hand underneath a fresh plant sprout the nandroid beamed proudly at her shipmate. "I said we've grown lettuce!" she said with a giggle as Tatyana floated forwards and stopped at the side of the garden bed. "Ah I see, that was the last one we were waiting for da?" she asked as she pulled herself down to the level of the bed, staring at the tiny seedlings up close. Looking around the small room at the array of experiments, Tilly couldn't help but feel proud of the small menagerie of life they'd cultivated in so short a time. "It's amazing that they're all growing like this so far from Earth! Out here in the middle of absolute nowhere, they're still thriving! Isn't that neat?" the plucky nandroid asked, unable to hide her enthusiasm and pride in their little zoo of life. Reminded of their extreme distance from home, Tatyana gulped involuntarily and quickly changed the subject. "Have our ants gotten any better since yesterday?" she asked hurriedly. Tilly shook her head sadly before glancing at the rapidly-collapsing little ant farm she'd been sent up with. "They don't seem to get how to move around without gravity, I thought maybe they'd get used to it but," she trailed off, staring at the little glass enclosure occupied by the confused creatures. "But no luck," Tatyana finished as she floated towards the station devoted to the tiny habitat. "If they not adapt soon, not going to be any left by the time we reach Mars."

>"What are you saying?!" Tilly cried out as she sat opposite Director Georges in his small office. Only a few weeks remained until the fateful launch towards Mars, and Georges had waited until nearly the last minute to address the pressing issue. "What I'm saying is that Orion is a uniquely sensitive project! Letting a Soviet aboard to ride all the way there and back is well, it's a serious risk to national security!" Staring across his cluttered desk at the defiant little robot Georges sighed and instinctively reached for a flask hidden in his desk's bottom drawer. "I'm not saying anything is gonna happen, it's just that the DoD is keen to make sure nothing does, yeah?" not bothering to hide it he took a long sip from the small steel vessel and winced visibly. Tilly shifted around in her seat while he drank, already uncomfortable enough before the liquor had emerged. "I know her, she's not spying on us," she said in a cool tone, trying to hide the obvious offense in her synthetic voice. Georges shook his head imperceptibly, staring at the floor rather than meet the little robot's sharp gaze. "Probably. All I'm saying is that if worse comes to worse, you're authorized to neutralize the other pilot, if it's in the interest of national security. I was told specifically to inform you of that." Tilly blinked, then grimaced angrily. "You want me to shut her off?!" Standing up sharply from her seat the nandroid shot a glare at her de-facto owner. "Sir, with all due respect," she began, closing her optics even as she clenched her little fists. "Tatyana is my friend." Blue optics opened suddenly looking upwards at the low ceiling of the her recharging bunk on board the Neriene. Blinking a few times as her senses painted her surroundings Tilly put a hand to her forehead and sighed. It was not the first time a direct memory file had played without permission during her recharge cycle, but reliving those terse moments left her feeling anxious after. Unplugging, she pulled herself along through the second deck's hallway towards the central shaft leading up to the first. A few moments later she was rounding the curve of the top deck's hallway, passing the empty bridge and coming around to the other side of the vessel. The second room of the top deck had been labeled 'the observatory', though despite the presence of a meager telescope few observations had actually been made there so far. The main informal use of the room had become sight-seeing, a wide pane of thick glass providing an unprecedented view of the empty space they hurtled through. As Tilly floated through the doorway she spotted her Soviet friend hovering lazily in front of the window, optics locked on some faraway point. Smiling, the nandroid floated into the room towards her after giving a light knock to announce herself. "You're up here too?"

>Lost in thought, Tatyana was startled when she heard the rap of Tilly's metal knuckles against the hull of the ship. "Ah? Oh, uh, da. Was just thinking, is all." Turning around she watched as her American friend floated across the short gap between the doorway and inner-hull, stopping against the large bay window and staring out with a strange fixated expression. "You can't help but think about it, right?" Tilly asked without looking away from the unchanging star-field, her mind easily fixating on their destination. "How we're so far out, on our way right now and getting closer every second!" Tatyana looked away from her friend and the window, focusing on the easier-to-digest steel floor instead. "I, I try not to dwell on it too much, easier when we are working. We have mission, we follow plan, we go home." Feeling suddenly exposed in some undiscernible way, Tatyana pushed lightly off the wall and floated away from the window towards the other end of the small room. Turning to watch Tilly put her back to the curved window, her smile fading slightly at Tatyana's cool demeanor. 'is that what's bothering her?' she thought to herself for a moment analyzing the subtle emphasis she'd put on 'home', 'homesickness?'. Floating slowly the Russian arrested her drift on the far wall with a gentle push, lazily sailing back across the small room towards the middle of the room at a leisurely pace. "The first time you do this kind of mission, flight to Venus I mean," Tatyana began, seemingly unsure of herself. "The one you saved me from, you mean?" Tilly answered back playfully, the smile returning to her faceplate. Tatyana's squarish cheek lights gave a brief glow and she shot her friend a little smirk. "Da, that one. When you are out there, out here I mean," correcting herself quickly she looked away hesitantly. "You spend much time thinking about home?" The nandroid pilot blinked once, then shook her head with a light giggle. "No way, home is boring! Tests, tests, fetching coffee, more tests. Down there it's like, I don't know, sometimes it feels like I'm stuck in glue!" realizing too late that it had sounded more like an outburst than a confession Tilly sheepishly pulled her legs to her chest while she floated in front of the window. "Ah, you don't ever feel like that, do you?" Tatyana gave her an inscrutable look before shaking her head. "Nyet, especially after first time on moon. Being back home, sun and clouds overhead, wind in hair? Nothing ever felt so safe and, I guess 'right'. Now every time I leave it," she trailed off, grimacing. "Part of code in back of mind keeps saying 'not coming home this time, Tatyana!' " Her voice became more casual as she spoke even as her words unsettled her friend. "But, we always do! Right?" Tilly added quickly with a nervous expression. Tatyana scoffed. "Da, we get lucky. Scratch that actually, I get lucky but you are like bad luck charm, always falling out of sky or getting stuck in it." The pair of machines laughed easily together, and both felt a little better for it. Crossing her arms over her chest Tatyana let out a shaky little sigh. "I know our lifespan, got no problem shutting down when my time come, it's just..." again she trailed off, and Tilly leaned forward expectantly hanging on her word. "My, I mean, the boys." Processing the thought for a moment Tilly cocked her head to one side, but remained silent. Looking up quickly Tatyana appeared almost embarrassed and stumbled over herself to explain. "Not that Master and missus aren't wonderful parents!" she said quickly, pausing a moment as she studied her friend's expression and detected no outrage or judgment from the other machine. "It's just, Master is so often gone from home, even when he is there he lock himself in office or plop in front of television, hardly take any interest in them!" Some previously unrecognized inner floodgate opened, Tatyana couldn't stop herself from continuing as Tilly listened intently. "And Ma'am, she...well she is kind and warm to be sure, surely she love them. But, so often she seem, I don't know, disinterested?" Furrowing her steel brow the Russian robot appeared to sulk. "Sometimes I wonder if they should have just gotten a couple dogs, for how involved they both are in boy's lives." Tilly gulped involuntarily as the heavy sentiment sank onto her shoulders. "Tatyana, I didn't know it was...well I didn't know," she stammered, processor running with the new foreign idea that life with a real family may not always be as fulfilling as her programming told her it'd be. "Sorry," Tatyana muttered quietly, averting her friend's optics. "forgive my complaining, just...easy to get lost in thought here sometime, da?" Smiling Tilly reached out for her shoulder and pulled the surprised cosmobot into a quick hug. "Nothing to forgive, believe me I get it! I can't tell you how nice it is to not be doing this one alone Tatyana, I'm really glad you're here." Wincing slightly the Russian robot returned the hug, her golden optics fixed on some distant point in the distance. "Thanks, Tilly"

>With only two hours of recharging Tatyana felt sluggish, a constant internal warning chastising her for booting herself hours before her battery would be fully topped off again. Digging through her spartan set of personal affects she retrieved a small camera, loaded with microfilm tucked away into the compact little rectangle. Silently she pulled herself through the doorway of her small quarters into the second deck's hallway, floating slowly passed Tilly's room a few moments later and making sure the orange-haired nandroid was deep in her recharge cycle before continuing. Pulling herself up the ladder passed the first deck she wasted no time in opening the airlock's first hatch and entering, shutting the door behind her and breathing a shaky little sigh. 'Halfway there,' she thought to herself, releasing the small camera to float free in the cylindrical little airlock while she retrieved her insulated suit from the wall and quickly dressed. "Go out, take photos, come in, back to bed," she muttered to herself nervously before clasping her helmet in place over the neck ring, reaching out a gloved hand for her slowly rotating camera. "Then it's done."

>Tilly spun end over end in zero g, frantically reaching for some handhold she could not find. "Got you!" A voice rang out up close, somehow not over radio as she turned to see who had grabbed her. Bonnie's smiling face met her, and for a moment she felt relieved until noticing the rapidly accelerating field of stars behind the curly-haired nandroid. The pair were linked by a mere cable that Tilly held onto by hand, rotating faster and faster impossibly around a common center of mass. As they sped up Tilly began to lose her grasp, sliding down the rope and further from Bonnie as the pair spun in wider and wider arcs. She tried to shout, but found herself voiceless while Bonnie stared at her with worry from across the increasing distance. Finally her grip slipped, and Tilly was flung off from the tether into the endless expanse. 'EMERGENCY BOOTUP SEQUENCE' a tiny corner of her synthetic mind rang out, and seconds later her blue optics were flung wide-open viewing only the darkened interior of her little bunk. Several seconds passed as she processed the raw data from the unintended simulation while she breathed heavily to cool down her interior. "Are they getting worse?" she whispered out loud to herself, her voice sounding small and afraid when she heard it. Reaching behind her she quickly unplugged her charging cable and let it float above her cot, unwilling to try for another recharge now regardless of her low-battery lethargy. She'd never spoken to anyone about these 'dreams', or nightmares as she was coming to know them, but now felt she wouldn't be able to recharge again without talking to someone about it. Unstrapping the small strip of velcro which held her to her cot during charging she kicked off the bed and sailed effortlessly through the door, grabbing hold of the frame and translating her momentum the few feet down the hall to Tatyana's room. Pausing at the doorframe she blinked in surprise, spotting the empty cot. 'Still on?' she wondered to herself, then turned her head over her shoulder and raised her voice. "Hey, Tatyana! Where are you, the observatory?" she called out, listening expectantly for several seconds. Hearing only the gentle hum of the machinery around her she called out again. "Tatyana?" Moving towards the central shaft she pulled herself up along the ladder to the first deck, exiting the tube and pushing off the walls to propel herself along the circular hallway. "Hello?" Passing the two doors leading to both the bridge and the observatory Tilly returned in a tight circle to where she'd started, no closer to locating her friend and more worried for her now than for her silly dreams. Turning back she reentered the central shaft and looked up at the airlock's main hatch. Staring for a few moments the nandroid pulled herself up to the glass porthole and gazed inside curiously, wondering if her friend had gone to retrieve something from the Soviet lander. Two insulated suits had been affixed to the inside of the airlock before launch each assigned to one of the two pilots, but only one remained now leaving a prominent empty space she spotted along one half of the inner wall. Without knowing exactly why Tilly felt as if her hydraulic fluid dropped several degrees. Gulping involuntarily, she reached a shaky hand out to open her side of the tunnel between the Neriene and the lander.

>Tatyana's breathing was quicker than it needed to be, her processor buzzing with paranoia as she floated at the rear of the great vessel on nearly thirty meters of tether. The pusher plate didn't seem too remarkable to her, though she snapped image after image of each component as instructed by her master. Pulling herself carefully in between the plate and the rest of the ship she tried snapping a few photos of the small exit for the nuclear charges, but had no idea whether they would prove useful to the engineers back home. "Who knows," she muttered out loud in her helmet, surprising herself with the disgust in her own voice. Giving the structure one more look she tucked the little camera into her suit's breast pocket, snapping the fastener there closed to secure it. The third internal warning prompt of low battery in as many minutes exasperated her, but Tatyana pulled herself back along the end of the ship and down its length towards the lander docked to the bow. Slowing as she approached the front of the ship, she turned herself gently and began to maneuver to the opposite side where the lander's hatch remained open as she'd left it. As the doorway came into sight so did the suited form of Tilly leaning out of it, staring expectantly down at the end of Tatyana's tether as she came into view. The Soviet scrambled for a moment as the shock threw her off balance, missing a handhold in her surprise and drifting out of reach of the ship on her long tether too quickly to recover. For several seconds the two robots locked optics, equal expressions of surprise and fear matched on both faceplates. A moment later Tilly glanced down looking intently at the camera fastened to her friend's suit before looking up with an expression the Soviet found impossible to read. "Tilly?" she called out quietly, remembering quickly that the suit's radio was not on. Ten meters out, fifteen, Tatyana began to breath more heavily as the nandroid remained motionless at the lander's hatch. The American robot looked down at the small carabiner hooking her lifeline to the lander for a too-long moment, then reached for it. "Tilly?!" she called out again in vain, a sudden panic overtaking her for a split second. Gripping the tether Tilly gave a gentle tug, pulling her Soviet friend back towards the hatch with a determined look on her faceplate. Tatyana held her breath for nearly half a minute, only breathing again when she was in contact with her lander being tugged inside by the American robot. A minute later the hatch was shut behind them and the two robots floated uncomfortably close in the tiny lander, optics locked on one another. Tilly unclasped her helmet first and gave it a shove away from her, breaking eye-contact finally. "That was part of your mission," she said simply, less an accusation than a resigned statement of fact. The palpable disappointment in her quiet voice cut at Tatyana deeper than she'd expected it to, and she opened her mouth ready to defend herself. Both robots paused for a moment, perplexed as their sensitive microphones picked up a sound dulled through the airlock separating the lander from the rest of the ship. "What's that noise?"

>The pair of robots left their helmets in the lander as they traversed the short airlock back to the Neriene, neglecting to change out of their suits as they investigated a staccato buzz emanating from the bridge. Floating to the controls above her seat Tilly's optics darted about the multitude of figures displayed by the ship's computer. "What is it?" Tatyana asked nervously trying to follow her friend's optics as they scanned over the screens. "It's the altimeter, but it's showing that we're two hundred miles over something, wait make that one fifty! We're closing in!" Tilly announced nervously, processor racing to understand what was happening. "One hundred!" she called out again, looking to Tatyana with worry. "Avoidance maneuver! Can we get out of the way?" the Soviet suggested hopefully, slumping when Tilly shook her head. "There's no time, I don't even know what to avoid!" the nandroid called back helplessly, faceplate turning from concern to panic. For the next several seconds the two machines embraced without thinking about it, optics locked on the curved window adorning the small bridge. Human eyes might have only registered a momentary blur, but two sets of mechanical minds processed frame-by-frame the pass of the object mere meters away. Both held their breath for several seconds later as the altimeter read an ever-increasing distance to the rogue object. Finally Tilly began to giggle, breaking into a wild laughter as she released her friend and floated backwards with her optics tightly shut. "An asteroid!" she exclaimed as if it were some punchline, then laughed even harder. "Can you believe it?! Tatyana, the odds that really just happened are...gosh I don't even know! Did you SEE that!?" Holding her belly Tilly doubled over in mid-air, tumbling slowly end over end as she laughed. Seeing the little nandroid laugh freely released some pent-up worry in her Soviet co-pilot. Part of her mind told her in no uncertain terms that her friend was certifiably malfunctioning, while another part made an equally compelling argument that she was functioning better than most. Letting out a heavy sigh as Tilly's laughter abated, she raised her optics to meet the nandroid's and gave her a sad look, gently tapping the camera still affixed to the breast of her suit. Tilly's optics followed downwards and her expression darkened as she remembered the events preceding their miraculous asteroid encounter. Closing her optics for a moment she sighed, then smiled warmly. "It's kind of dumb, isn't it? Here we are all the way out here, but we're still tied down to Earth by humans' concerns," Tilly said simply, shaking her head as she began to pull at her suit's gloves. "We just became the first to ever see an asteroid up close, almost TOO up close, but our big worry is gonna be human politics?" Tatyana looked down and furrowed her brow, silently cursing her master for imposing this on her. "Orders are orders Tilly, I...I don't like it either," she replied quietly, angering herself with her weak excuse. Tilly gave a surprised little laugh and raised an eyebrow. "My orders were to shut you off if you were doing espionage stuff, obviously I'm not gonna," she said matter-of-factly while Tatyana's optics widened in surprise at her unapologetic dismissal of duty. "Tilly, I been thinking of this since we were last on moon together, when we sent Nadya back to Earth? How you have such easy time disobeying? Does it not bother you? Is it not against programming?" Looking up expectantly Tatyana searched Tilly's expression, confused at the bemusement modeled on her faceplate. "How can anyone feel limited up here?" The nandroid replied with a simple shrug. "Sure you might get in trouble for something when you get back, but out here? THIS far away?" Shaking her head Tilly stared out the window while a slow smile spread across her faceplate. "I can't explain it, it's just...different. You know?" Looking out through the window Tilly found herself lost in thought, her friend's words spurring a flurry of thoughts she'd largely ignored or distracted herself from as of late. After several seconds a sharp sound drew her attention back from the window. As she turned she saw Tatyana holding her small camera in front of her, the back of the case open as she spooled out black film jerkily. "What are you doing?" Tilly asked in shock as she watched the film float around her friend, dumbstruck. "Something dumb," Tatyana responded simply, apparent new resolve evident in her voice. "Something that will probably bite me in aft later but, something YOU would do."


End file.
